Our time of lying
by son-of-puji
Summary: Time changes, people change. Kitty comes to a decision that changes both her and Lance's life and they deal with it in their own way, differently. But there are feelings you just can't erase easily. Self-deception, lies and going downhill lie ahead.
1. On the verge of nothing

**Summary: **Time changes, people change. Kitty comes to a decision that changes both her and Lance's life and they deal with it in their own way, differently. Kitty and Lance's POV in every other chapter.

**Disclaimer: **I don't own anything, only the plot.

**Note:** Lance's POV.

**Note#2:** Dreamschemer was so nice to be my beta. She worked a lot to kill my mistakes:) Thanks again. If any errors left, mea culpa, I tend to be stubborn sometimes.

**Our time of lying**

**Chapter 1: On the verge of nothing**

There are things that never change.

And there are those that always.

Something has been deforming between us for weeks; slowly, like plastic in fire; slowly, terribly, pulling a new shape on. And stinking.

It's been a little less than a year now. Not too much, I know. It doesn't amount to more than those years of wrath we've shared. I've never been happier, though, never been more grateful for merely being alive and able to wake up in the morning, knowing we belong together - even if no one beside us knew it.

An Apocalypse has come and gone and nothing's changed.

Or maybe except for one thing. We made up. And split up and made up but never mind; nothing in this world works smoothly.

Is this something real? I don't know. Something I can hold onto? Yes, definitely.

One would think the end of the world would shake things up more, but we've all fallen back into the same routines: the humans incite, the Brotherhood retaliates, and the X-Men play peacemaker. It didn't matter that the Brotherhood helped the X-men save the world. It was nothing special or unique. We had worked and fought together before; against Juggernaut, against dimensional monsters, against the Sentinel. Fighting Apocalypse wouldn't change the status quo. I was still a Brotherhood member who couldn't be trusted and Kitty was a goody-goody X-man, one of those who had always brought us down. Mystique's puppet vs. Xavier's.

The post-Apocalypse period just happened to be the same as the pre-Apocalypse had been. Mystique is back – or rather she was when I last checked it. Having considered the look on Kitty's face short after she had admitted to her friends that she was going to spend an afternoon with me, I decided to play the same old boring game again and better to lurk around only in the backstage – we didn't need our relationship to be public. Kitty agreed. Officially again Avalanche hated Shadowcat and vice versa. And we have been waiting for the trumpet to call us into war again, fighting each other with fake venom in our heart.

I suppose she was loath to disappoint her friends. And I… I didn't want to be teased or used because of it. I had given Mystique enough reasons, means and possibilities to use me, she didn't need one more. I didn't want anyone to know how they could get to me. Though at first I so wanted to rub Summers' nose in it. I wanted everyone to know that I might be worth something if Kitty was stuck to me that much. In fact, I did feel this way. And still, somehow, for some reason I kept it quiet.

But all along behind all masks, lies and hatred I was only Lance Alvers and she was only Kitty Pryde, and the only thing we wanted in the middle of this ridiculous war was trying to love each other quietly while pretending to suck each other's blood.

But Kitty kissed me and nothing else seemed to have sense. It was amazing how she could wipe away the agonizing brooding of a whole wakeful night with a passing touch. She could wrap it around my whole being, shutting me away from the real world, letting me live in a world created on my own from sudden desires and bold dreams. I'd never seen the danger in it. I'd never realized where I might fall from.

Man can be so ingenious when it's about convincing themselves. Or rather, misleading. You believe what you want to believe. You create false signs and cling onto unfaithful hopes. Hope, yeah - the cruelest thing created for human destruction. It cheats you, laughs at you and the tighter you cling onto it, the more it fails you.

There are days when we hardly meet. I never call her. I should not. She is the one who always searches for me when feeling the need for my presence. I've never thought of what would happen if she stopped missing me one time. Would I still be waiting for her call? Or would I understand it without words?

We were in a movie today but I already can't remember what the title or the story of the film was. I'd lost any kind of interest long before it even started. The lights were still on and we were sitting there, staring at the empty screen as if we were puzzling out some intricate code. However, the real puzzle was not on the screen but happening inside: I could feel there was something wrong; sitting there, arm against arm, I felt like we were million miles away from each other. I was dazed by questions throbbing inside. Is this what happens to all relationships over time? Is this how love dies? Does it always die a long, silent, painful death? Back in the day she would have calmed my worries with a single word or touch and bring back the tenderness. This time she remained silent and still, and I had no idea how to take over this task and patch this gaping hole of disquiet.

We watched the film as if we were strangers who had just happened to find free seats next to each other. I was going to ask her several times what we really were doing there at all, what was going on, what was missing in this moment of time that had been there before, but words died in my throat like burning paper. I don't know if it was indicating something – I _don't wanna_ know it.

You see? So much for me being clear-headed; I managed to mislead myself, sweeping my bothers aside. I forced myself to ignore all those telling moments of cold; I pretended that her listlessness was actually a quiet content: honestly, isn't it ridiculous to feel bad just because there was something wrong in the way we were sitting next to each other? After all, there was no reason for us to be upset with each other. There was no clear reason for something to be going awry.

Yet somehow beneath the comforting veneer of happiness, there was something wrong.

One might say everything comes to an end. That this is the way of life.

Splendid, yet another random and shallow pitch, enjoy it.

Now leave me alone, I'm too busy with hunting hopes.


	2. On the hither and other side of an oak

**A/N:** Kitty's POV.

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**Chapter 2: On the hither and other side of an oak**

There was no memory, no trace of us in this world. In the eyes of people we didn't _subsist_ together.

This relationship was almost non-existent. There wasn't even a photo taken of us, except for two quick snapshots taken in a photo booth at Bayville plaza. And even those I had to fretfully hide and guard deep in my pockets and drawers. I know photos cannot make a relationship work but I hung onto any tangible proof of our love. It could have made it somehow real a bit. You know the story: little things make the world go round.

There was no _our song_, there was no _our film_. There wasn't even _our place_ at all like the other couples had. But there were our lies, our secrets and our betrayals.

There was no place for us in this world. We were loafing around in the streets, restless, rootless like runaway kids; when we were together we were exiles. Walking in those streets, knowing every corner, every tiny crack in the concrete layer by heart, and still unable to call them home, call them ours. Even in the streets we were strangers, hiding, shadows at the feet of walls, faceless, nameless. If I'd want to be sappy and dramatic - we were two fool orphans of love. There was no place for us.

We hid our love from the others so deep that there were times when even we couldn't find it.

I was always worried that after our times together I wouldn't be able to bury him deep enough inside my mind and I'd bring his memory and traces in the mansion almost as obviously as the scent of him. After all, I lived among two telepaths.

I lost track of my life somewhere between a goodnight kiss and the wake-up call of the alarm-clock. I stopped living my life as my own. I started observing it, judging it from outside as if it was someone else's. I kept analyzing it with the expert and accuracy of one who'd always been good at Chemistry; the one who might be the cruelest to you is surely yourself.

I had a life.

A display life of a senior student at Bayville High, teenage of eighteen, her parents' only child.

And under this surface I had another life.

First class X-man, role-model superhero, world-savior mutant.

Only Lance knew that even beyond this I still had a third life, hidden from everyone.

The part of a cursed love - oh, what a drama again, yeah?

There was no romance in hiding anymore. Anyway, romance was far from everything Lance was. He sometimes accidentally slipped in to it but nothing was planned. The garden of secrecy sprouts beautiful flowers of excitement, but toxic and barren at the same time. There's poison in them, slowly spreading, slowly killing poison that suggests what you're doing must be wrong in a way.

Mankind is not a creature for solitude. There are things that should be said out loud for letting them go by, or else they keep bugging you. And too many bugs would eat you up from inside.

It was killing me. It was making me wonder whether I had something real. Something right. In the key periods of my life all I always wanted was being accepted. In the beginning, by my schoolmates at Northbrook High, later by the X-men, by my own parents and the other people. Lance might have at one time wanted the same, being accepted, respected; but as he smashed into walls, he stopped caring about it. That was him. I was not that kind. I couldn't stop thinking of other people, couldn't give a cold shoulder to them. He could. He'd got used to lying and cheating, going against the whole world. I had always been too honest for that. And here I was having a relationship that wouldn't be accepted in a million years. I denied him with words and acts hundred times a day and I knew he did the same. It was such a hard fight to keep my feelings for him inside me untouched and unchanged. It wore me out. And one day you just wake up with questions in your head that have no answers. When you forget what makes you carry on, when you keep asking yourself what love is worth, and you cannot even find the part of you that once had been able to answer this question.

Was this something real? Surely not. Something I could hold onto? I wish I knew.

There are things you know you would not forget in a thousand years exactly the moment you experience them. No matter how trifling or passing they'd be; a scent, a voice, a falling leaf or raindrop, it makes no difference. I have a lot of things like that in a secret room of my mind full of strange cobwebbed memories. Mostly of Lance. Always these intangible memories, nothing physical that you would keep pinned on a cork message board on your wall or in your wallet – nothing that could have built my days upon.

It was two weeks ago, at least. He was going to give me a lift home. We got into his Jeep, that old, wrecked car he adored more than anything else in his life. We were talking about something uninteresting that I paid little attention to. In my mind I was somewhere else, or nowhere in particular. For some reason I had a bad taste in my mouth, something very similar to what one might feel when looking forward to something and then nothing happens - though I had no such reasons, or rather, none I knew about. He turned on the recorder. I suddenly realized how I always hated that rubbish music he preferred to listen and sing along with. We'd been on a date, nothing special. Yeah, a date - in the dictionary meaning of our secret, twisted world: crawling in dark, deserted places. I rested my elbow on the door, and knew that later when I was going to walk through the mansion park after saying goodnight to him, I would have to look up in my date calendar whom I had been "officially" spending my evening with. Was it Arcade or a library evening again, maybe a movie with my non-existent girlfriends or another charity work? I wanted to cry at this thought.

He parked the Jeep behind an oak-tree. Always the same oak-tree; behind it, his car couldn't be seen from the mansion. That tree was the borderline of our love. Crossing the line we were enemies, hating and fighting each other. Beyond that line I didn't love him and he didn't love me.

There are words that were born in you long ago, they're ripening and waiting there without any conscious thought about them.

"Now we should part here", I said. "It's over." Just only when I heard my words I realized their existence, and that they had been restlessly sitting inside me for who knows how long. I so felt the truth of them.

Lance apparently thought I was referring to our actual date and wished me goodnight. I felt like striking him.

"You don't get it, Lance. We'd better break up, there's no sense in forcing it. Bye, Lance, never try to talk to me again."

He laughed at me at first. He was so annoying. I unfastened my seat-belt, ready to get out of the car. At last he slowly caught on that I wasn't joking. I wanted to slap that dumb confusion off his face.

"What have I done again? I didn't fight the X-geeks, I haven't stolen anything lately, or even painted the lockers red."

I sighed at his childish retort with the old sigh that knew the battle had been over long before. "It's not about that. We don't fit, we've got different personalities and morals that always make us clash. Let's face it, Lance, it was just a teenage crush, we can't make it last till the end of time."

I knew what was coming next. Somehow the whole conversation had been stored in my mind completely. He was asking me about this oh-so serious antagonism between us. I was tired and hungry, and wanted nothing more than having a shower.

"There are little, annoying things just gathering and gathering and then spill. They got to be too much lately."

"What things?" He cried out, looking both hurt and feral at the same time.

I shut the door of the Jeep loudly. I idly registered crossing our oak-line. "I don't know. There are a lot of things I just hate about you."

He snorted, all bravado and jest. "Ow, please, say that less than ten."

I snapped. "Oh, save it. You see, this is one of them. I hate your stupid jokes."

"What? You can't be serious. If that's your problem, okay, I won't tell any stupid jokes again."

He made me mad. I wanted to crush him so much. "As always, you don't get the big picture... And don't be so arrogant. I hate it. I... I hate your apathy, your car, your music, the way you run your fingers through your hair, I don't know..."

He was shouting at me that I couldn't split up because of his hairstyle. He was so wrong, he was such a child. I told him I hated him for forcing me into another quarrel again when I hadn't planned to end it like this. He had been always so unable to accept others' decisions.

I was already at the gates when he spoke up again. "So you have someone else in your life, then, huh?"

I laughed at him bitterly, with a hint of sarcasm. "Oh, men, you always think of this!"

He leapt after me, the ground shaking, but couldn't catch me. I was already behind the gates. "I really don't know what you expect from me. To bow my head and mumble thank you for literally ditching me for _no damned reason_?"

I looked at him sharply, tiredly. "Don't fret, Lance, it won't change anything. Go home."

I left him there, yelling and clutching the iron bars like a caged beast. I could smell the scent of apple pie floating out the kitchen window, and I broke into a smile.

A few days, perhaps a week passed by. Something huge left my mind and heart, something heavy and hungry, leaving me numb inside, and limp. It was raining that day when I exited the library with my bag held high above my head. I was running toward a bus shelter when he stepped before me out of nowhere. It took me a few moments to recognize him. His face was worn and haggard and had a stern edge, making him look older. We didn't speak. I was shivering with cold by the rain outside and something undefinable inside. He didn't seem to register that he was drenched to the skin. I started growing impatient when he finally spoke.

"You really don't wanna see me again?"

I knew I didn't bat an eyelid, and I felt like stone. I didn't spare a moment to muse. That was the last word that had been waiting for long to be said out loud. "Really."

He didn't say a word, his hands in his pockets, pain in his brows, and I saw something dying in his eyes. That very minute I hated gazing at him. I never heard his voice again. He turned and walked away out of my life. I stared at his retreating back and suddenly felt unexplainably alone.

Raindrops were salty that day.


	3. Death before life to live and fail

_Thank you, guys, so much for the reviews!_

**A/N#1: **Lance's POV.

**A/N#2: **Song 1: 'All along' by The Offspring. Song 2: 'Wicked game' by Chris Isaak.

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**Chapter 3: Death before life to live and fail**

_All along  
__I think I really knew  
__It was there in the words unspoken  
__All along  
__Still believed in you  
__Now I stand here betrayed and broken_

So strange how one fatal evening can change your whole life.

If man could die twice in life, I guess that was when I died for the first time.

In a sense, on a higher lever I stopped existing as a human. I would eat, drink, sleep and walk, in short I was scraping along like a withered indoor plant. That wasn't much.

I was dumped, I was let down. I was betrayed.

And I didn't understand. It seemed my brain couldn't process a single thought. All I could do was blaming everyone around me. And remembering. That was my living, self-torturing nightmare - recalling words that were long gone, and still, each one was a nail in my flesh. I should have done, said and sworn so many things but deep inside I suspected, I _knew_ it was a decision made behind my back, a decision I'd had no words in.

What could I have done when she casted made-up reasons equal to nothing at my head? You cannot fight nothings, neither the dying of emotions nor passing of time. It wasn't only her words that killed me. It was the look on her face, the tone of her voice. That was something I'd never met before - never while we were together.

_Really,_ she said. She might have meant to compress all our relationship into this only word? Was it worth so little that it could be finished like this? With some foolish accusations and a word thrown in my face. She didn't want to see me again... I knew she really meant it, there was no lie on her face. I felt for sure I wasn't needed anymore; a far too familiar feeling - that had been the first thing in my life I had to learn.

I was only a mean for her to fill in the hollows in her days. I guess now she'd wanted to have an ordinary side in her life like all the normal teens of our age, to take on the feeling, the _fact_ that she was only eighteen, to forget for a few moments the burden of saving the world had put on her shoulders. I'm sure she happened to choose me of all people around her because by my side she at least didn't have to keep her mutation and the other side of her life a secret. She'd had enough secrets apart from this. Isn't it ironic that our relationship was the next thing she had to keep back from the world?

Maybe finally she'd had enough of this. I don't know. I tried to blame her, hate her for she had never tried to talk to me, never tried to make me fight for us.

I'd known before that I was in love with her, it wasn't hard to figure out. I just hadn't realized how deep it ran. So right, so true that you never know what you have until you lose it. Never know, never feel its importance. She was the only one in this world who could make me feel like a god with a single word and toss me into the deepest hell with a mere glance. And I fell from too high distance. It's a fall you cannot survive unhurt. They say it's the way of time. You can never understand this until it kicks you down along with your precious little pink world.

How annoying it was, having something deep inside that you cannot reach to cure. Something that makes everything rotten from inside. And you have only that stomach-churning feeling that you failed and lost the only thing that mattered in your pitiful life, the only person who could make you feel a human, feel _someone._

I had no reason to stay. I couldn't. My only bond that had been binding me to Bayville was snapped. Meeting her by accident and hearing only her last word in my mind, always that word wasn't something I was craving for. I couldn't wish her a happy and easy life, couldn't wish her someone who'd be better than me. I might be base but I was hurt too deeply.

_I never dreamed that I'd meet somebody like you  
And I never dreamed that I'd lose somebody like you_

At least there is one good thing in living in beggary - there is not much to pack. I shoved my life into a duffel bag and left.

I left without a word. I'd never thought I would leave like this one day. I did want to say something. Really. I halted in front of the living room and was watching my so-called friends staring at the TV or doing something useless. They didn't even perceive me being there - or missing from among them to begin with. I guess only Wanda looked up out of her depression, noticing me standing in the doorway, parting, and in a way already million miles away from there.

Strange that I closed a part of my life literally with the shut of a door.

I fled. I drove away, not seeing where, knowing the road would never come to an end underneath me. I didn't need a map. Why would someone need it when they have no destination? Was I heading to east, west, north or south or the hell itself didn't matter. How ironic that I had only one place in the world I could call home and it was Bayville, and here I was attempting to get as far from it as possible. Leaving Bayville, every city was wrapped up in apathy for me but at least none of them had Kitty Pryde living in them.

I decided to stop and stay at the first place where I get a true smile. I had to drive such a long way.

I stopped only when I was short of petrol. My body didn't seem to have any needs. I hardly slept and hardly ate for days without even realizing it. At a petrol station I bought the cheapest burger they had. The price reflected the quality, it was just as bad as cheap but I couldn't feel the taste of food anymore. And couldn't care less.

"Anything else?" the salesclerk asked. I was musing. A new life would have come in useful. A new heart. Or a bullet.

"No, thanks," I said in the end. "That's all."

Yeah, that was all. That nothing I was having was all to take along. I realized I'd never had a life. If I'd had, it wouldn't have been so easy and simple to leave it behind in no time. Whole day all I had always been doing was waiting for Kitty's call, shaking some vending machines and sometimes doing the grocery. It hardly could have been called a life. I'd never known how to live properly. Time had always slipped through my fingers unused. I should have started everything from the beginning, on my very own again.

I hadn't even figured out a plan when I was already certain I would in the end surely fail.


	4. A Paradise between forbidden doors

_Thank you, guys, for the reviews. I know it is not the happiest or fluffiest story ever written but I still hope you might like it._

**A/N:** Kitty's POV.

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**Chapter 4: A Paradise between forbidden doors**

Silent, easy days came upon me. I became light as a whisper. Something hateful fell asleep inside me, and faded away like bad smoke. Suddenly everything seemed so simple and obvious like never before.

My life was changing. I was finishing my studies at Bayville High and was about to leave my old life with my secrets and others' condemnations behind and attend university somewhere else. And all of a sudden he came to my life - so slowly, so modestly like water oozes through thick walls, and also just as persistently.

I'd always thought it would take me a life to make myself prepared to move on, forget all the miserable events, all the pain that hit me during my coaster-like relationship with Lance, and let the world back into my life, but actually it didn't. It was like turning a page, quick and easy. In my rare, honest, brave moments I felt, though, there were doors in my mind I didn't dare step through. It was like keeping things secret from myself.

I had so many things to do; finishing school and preparing for university, my duties as an X-man, and there he was, officially and devotedly, to everyone's joy, my once-enemy now-ally boyfriend.

I'd had weird thoughts around the days when Piotr first showed up at the mansion. On tired and lazy evenings, during sly, wakeful nights I was confused enough to set up a lame, shameful theory. I was so longing for caress and deep kisses that sometimes I desperately thought I could find it almost anywhere, by anyone's side, not depending on who it really was. Kisses are just kisses, caress is caress in every corner of the world. It wasn't a physical need; my soul was crying for that. I was lost, and Piotr found me. And without consideration and hesitation I let him be the part of my life. It could have been called ridiculous that I fell only for my enemies if Piotr could have really been regarded as a foe, but from his very first moment at the mansion no one had been having doubts about him.

I liked him pretty much. He was a good guy with misguided past, honest and gentle in a way no one would tell about him for first sight. He was always there when I needed someone to hold me tight, he was there without questions when some strange feeling made me cry without reason, when I felt so out-of-place as if someone had stolen my life away or something important from it. But these were rare, weak, pathetic moments and I hated myself for letting them bring me down.

I never thought of him. A few days after that old rainy day I heard he had disappeared from the town without a sign – so typical of him. And with that he stopped existing for me. That was the time when I shut those doors tight in my head. I didn't need ghosts from the past to mess my days up. It would have been unreasonable. In a way I was grateful to him for leaving Bayville. I never wasted my time on imagining how he was going or what life he was having. Using his idiotic pun: surely a _rocky_ one, but it wasn't my business anymore.

He hadn't been able to abandon his bad boy image, there were rare times when his bright sensual side broke to the surface, and it wasn't enough for me. The thought that sometimes hit me caused a faint twinge in my stomach: I had never been enough for him to change, never enough to choose me instead of his stupid games and twisted loyalty to Mystique, he kept going on with this fool I-hate-the-world-and-inversly-so-suck-it-up attitude, being in war with everything, with himself. It made me tired. It made me want to forget him.

With Piotr's love I got everything I couldn't have by Lance's side. He was reliable and thoughtful, I could experience what calmness means, and there were no lies, no hiding anymore, no fights and no accusations. He could openly talk about himself, his past, his feelings, all his fears, faults and dreams without interrogation, without force. Everything around me was peaceful like a snow-covered land, misty fog surrounded me, soft and quiet, without thunder and lightning. Without earthquake. When he kissed me, the world kept still. My heart kept still. No spinning of emotions, no spiraling, no race of blood. No dreamless nights and no daydreamings. I lived my life without distraction. Piotr had plans in his life, plans for a day, plans for the future, and in the center of all plans he had me. He was so unlike Lance who let the hours, days go by as they were, and so, letting his whole life pass him by, without goals and struggles for them. My friends and mentors at the X-mansion had never been more satisfied with me than during those months. I was well-balanced and developing with my skills rapidly, feeling no tiredness.

I think I've grown up finally. I left the immature teenage dreams behind, and it was easier than I'd ever expected. I made up lists about the advantages of my current life and relationship compared to my previous, I pondered over all my achievements and success, and it was a long list. There was no doubt I made a good decision when I finally brought my pathetic fling to an end. Sometimes I couldn't even understand my past self with its doubts and writhe; I knew it was hard and almost impossible to judge my old motivations with fair and neutral eyes so I closed my old self up with her misery and never thought of her again.

A whole new Kitty Pryde was born from her ashes whom I was proud of. This was a Kitty who didn't indulge in the luxury of examining herself through magnifying lenses, didn't want to label everything, to give a name to every single feeling, and it was a real blessing.


	5. Thousand ways of suicide

_I think it is the darkest of all chapters, I hope it won't make you too depressed. Actually, it is one of my personal favourites XD Tell me what you think:)_

**A/N#1:** Lance's POV.

**A/N#2:** Lyrics - Gone forever by Three days grace

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**Chapter 5: Thousand ways of suicide**

_So I'll stay out all night,  
__Get drunk and fuck and fight,  
__Until the morning comes  
__I'll forget about our life._

Is that all? Is it that easy? I can say I tried it. Once, twice, several times, on and on, every day with a twisted hope inside. It didn't work, it wasn't easy, though my means were awfully flawless.

Big city. Buzzing cars, honking buses hurtling by in a whirring of everyday life, briefcases and high-heeled shoes with matching suits running along and mixing together in the streets. And I was just watching, observer from beside a trashcan, the life of adults, life of ants. Only a shadow against the wall. A ghost. Without interest, without understanding. Like a broken, useless parking-meter. Empty.

In the first weeks I didn't even have a flat or a place to stay at, not as if I'd searched for one. Not as if I had any money for the rent. I spent the nights in nightclubs, in my car that I couldn't make myself to sell (bad decision as later on a hazy night I have problems to recall it got stolen), or at the foot of walls in dirty alleyways, or wrapped up in the impersonality of railroad stations. I sold my guitar in the first place. It was a hideous bargain but I didn't care. I used up the money in less than three days.

I undertook odd-jobs, everything, anything, didn't matter, exactly for as much dough as I needed at the moment. I lived like that day after day, crawling through one hour to the other and the other and on and on. I crawled along my life, days and weeks, as if there were no seasons, no daylight and night, only this unfathomable foreign will that kept me alive for who knows what reasons, despite the fact that I'd left myself behind to my fate just as she did, like a hit-and-run accident that I committed every day, again and again. And I was still alive, and nothing left only this crawl, crawl. The wind swept me along like rubbish, and those days I wasn't worth much more than that. I killed time in daze and oblivion, listened to ungifted bands in whatever shabby, rundown pubs I was tolerated despite being under age for alcohol, and never glanced around before crossing a roadway – but the world looked after me cruelly.

I had my daily routine. Chasing thrills, girls, alcohol and god-only-knows what kind of adrenaline-boosting adventures to feel _something_, anything, to feel I was still alive. The more extreme, dangerous and lewd these adventures were, the more I hated myself and felt miserable. I was constantly stinking of stale smoke and alcohol. I stole, I lied, I cheated, I did whatever it took. I tried to find pleasure by all means it was possible to get, I had 2in1 one-night stands in the dark backroom of filthy nightclubs, bathing in sweat and booze, with ears buzzing by moans, nose full of the scent of cheap perfumes… just to forget _that_ _one_, the only one who could ever be important for me. Sometimes with my cloudy eyes I couldn't distinguish present from past, the actual woman from Kitty, in the heat of passion I was groaning her name with mad mind, and later lying there exhausted and strangled by unshed, bitter tears. I was going after more and more serious corruptions but felt nothing but emptiness. It was a vicious circle that pulled me deeper and deeper. There was chill inside me. Killing, cruel chill. I wanted to shatter and destroy it with all my might at all costs.

Seizing, taking everything, in bulk, one after the other, all at once, getting, experiencing everything possible, that I hadn't have before, as if it was that hurt, as if it was missing from my life, making myself believe it was what I needed. As if all would get better this way. Whirling out of the world. That's what I really wanted. I thought if I did things I hadn't done with _her_, never beside _her_, then it wouldn't remind me of who and what I left behind, but her memory, her absence was echoing in, projected into every moment, casting reflection on splinters of time and events, events that we never experienced together, and everything was mirrored back enlarged and vividly, tormenting me.

I moved into an asshole-size apartment, living with other guys under the roof who didn't give a rat's ass who I was and what I did and it was fine with me. I got a job, got drunk, got fired, so I had all reasons to get drunk again, then sobered up to find another job just to have cash to get drunk and then fired again – a pretty predictable pattern for a life. Cycle of recycled money and booze, a constant circulation of despair. I wanted to be dumb, numb to stop myself thinking, thinking and questioning, and to forget everything, Northbrook, Bayville, mutants, earthquakes and her.

Inside I was devastated to the ground. I had no morals, no backbone and no dignity anymore. I was shredded. The onrush of wanting her, missing her mangled me. And somehow, unintentionally I tried to make my body match my soul. After all, my mutant powers were more than destructive, I had enough experience in destroying. It didn't matter if it was a building in question, a parking lot or me. Or every good thing in my wretched life. Wallowing in dirt, I felt a kind of sickening, morbid satisfaction in the defiant, frantic efforts to stain Kitty's memory and the time we'd spent with each other just to feel better, to make me believe I didn't lose anything irreplaceable but I didn't manage to. I still kept her deep inside purely and innocently, and her clean, white place in my soul tormented me more than any hangovers or dead feelings could. And after a while I just clung on to this pure memory desperately as if it was for my life. Sometimes it meant a hell of a contentment watching myself so debauched and in come-down, it was a cruel way of self-punishment, maybe for failing everything in my life, maybe only for not understanding what had gone wrong. Or maybe for the fact that I'd let down my shields and she could past them, she could get to me, and hurt me the way no one ever could before, not even my goddamn parents. I welcomed the pain though, at least it was a feeling. On grey, sober days I only felt ashamed. I just became the very man I'd never wanted to be, probably the same as my parents were, depraved and a huge failure. Life had a twisted sense of humor.

I thought I could handle it but the reality was I never even tried to; I didn't have the strength to handle anything anymore. It seemed as if Kitty had taken something essential, something significant from me with her. And I became increasingly scared that I might _never_ be able to feel anything, neither have a normal life, nor forget. I was buried alive in a world that didn't want me, and it was mutual. Sometimes I nearly hated her for having done this to me. And I hated her even more for leaving me after that. She'd changed me, messing me badly. I'd stepped on a way, parting with my old self and was left there all alone. I was like a half tamed beast; she should have taken responsibility of me. I believed I at least deserved an explanation, a chance to talk it over but I was wrong. She didn't care that much, she threw me away like a used up litter, immediately forgotten. She was surely living her happy little life, being smart and perfect as always, maybe even thankful that I cleared off from Bayville, and didn't even spare a moment to think of me. On this thought I was always propelling out of control. One would think I had enough opportunity to get used to be ditched, to get used to be unwanted. But it's hard to when you feel you did everything to be good, to be enough. And obviously failed. It's hard when you lost the only one who ever mattered. I was scared. I feared the world that I had known too well before but suddenly, when facing it again, grew strange and cold. I didn't fit in well anymore. It was unfamiliar. Being alone. Being on my own. Being a faux pas, forgotten and for the world almost non-existent.

Damn it, before I met her, I hadn't even known there were soft feelings without the disadvantage of appearing weak. I'd always thought feelings were for losers, for confusing you, making a fool of you. They'd been unwanted for me; I'd been trying so hard to shut myself into a neutral void where nothing but rage or anger existed, and I'd believed what I lived was a real, normal life. It was the easiest way to make myself avoid feeling miserable. I thought rationalism was what made me a human and I didn't suspect feelings could possess the same role. I never figured my theory was for those who've never been loved. Too bad life proved me true in the end. Too bad I didn't stay in that safe void where all emotions discharged far before they could reach me.

Feelings may lift you up, make you stronger. Sure enough.

But probably even more efficiently and permanently, they may also destroy you.


	6. Leaks in the dike

_All comments are welcome:)_

**_A/N#1:_** Kitty's POV. I'm sure you already get the hang of it.

**A/N#2:** Lyrics from 'Maybe tomorrow' by Stereophonics.

* * *

**Chapter 6: Leaks in the dike **

_I've been down and I'm wondering why  
These little black clouds keep walking around  
With me…  
Maybe tomorrow I'll find my way home  
_

There were only a few days for me till leaving Bayville behind for a campus. Piotr wasn't too thrilled about it, but there was nothing for him to worry about, even if it wasn't going to be easy. It was a strange feeling. I wanted to go as much as to stay. I called Bayville a home in the previous four years, and it was hard to part even if I was to come back during the winter and summer breaks, sometimes even for the weekends, and anytime when my help was needed. On the other hand, I needed a change. I needed new, unknown things in my life. Lately Rogue was nagging me that I became boring. Of course, for someone who liked to hit the road with Wolverine's motorbike after stealing it and creeping out of the mansion territory. I preferred staying in the calm, mild haze that surrounded me that time.

Those days a bad mood engulfed me with no particular reason. Melancholy rushed over me, a sad, nostalgic feeling that wrapped me up softly. It was about the time when strangely Lance occurred to my mind. Maybe there was something in the color of skies or scent of air or in other people's words that made me remember him. Something began throbbing inside me. It seemed a grey curtain had descended upon the world, everything grew faded. That day I was unable to speak to Piotr. I was sitting next to him, with his huge hands cupping mine, and couldn't help but think of the differences only. Piotr had large, masculine hands with rough, hard lines. The one perfect for grabbing axes. Or weapons. Or having metallic shields emitted by his own body be wrapped around his palm. His hands weren't like he was. He wasn't the one yearning for violence. Strange marriage was that of his character and mutant being's. I could still remember Lance's hands. Strange as it is, I remember them even more than Piotr's sometimes. I became like the elderly people: I can remember those memories that were gone far, happened in the past better than the recent ones. Those memories that burnt into me. Like the picture of his hands. Whenever he let me I'd taken his gloves off. His hands were virile too, long, strong fingers, cracked palm, rough tendons. They were like the very earth he used to shake. With jutting bones and sharp knuckles. And cuts. Wounds. Traces. So similar to him and his troubled soul.

I would always remember the last Sunday morning. I sneaked out of the kitchen, unnoticed, not feeling the patience to deal with the usual morning turbulence. I wanted to be alone. It was again one of those obscure moments that sometimes flooded me and made me withdraw into myself with no particular reason. I felt like a bottle, unfilled and transparent, even the sun shined through me. I'd spent the previous night with Piotr. If I had to be downright honest to myself, I was disappointed with a bitter taste in my mouth. But the disappointment had more to do with me than with him. He was gentle all along, caring more for me than for himself, and somehow… I'd been lying awake with his strong, iron-wired arms around me till the crack of dawn, fighting the urge to phase through them, through the bed, the floor, falling, falling, back to my room, my own bed. Or falling through the Earth into cold space. I hadn't felt anything. Not corporally, but inside. I'd imagined I would be enthusiastic at the first time, having a trembling sensation inside, but all I felt was fear and awkwardness of the situation.

Later when Rogue came in and found me on the balcony, noticing there was something wrong, I told her what had happened. I knew I could trust her. She grew a bit embarrassed, and remarked she wasn't the right one for sexological advices. I shook my head and tried to explain the emptiness that had stretched inside me, tried to explain how I wasn't yearning for any more occasions with Piotr. She remained silent, and I poured my misery on her. I laughed bitterly that I surely lived in dreamland, having pink imaginations about the first kiss, first night. Shame for someone being eighteen and still believing in knights in shining armor and body-melting love that obviously didn't exist.

Rogue looked at me sternly, contradicting me. "Look at Jean. She isn't like she usually sits on her balcony sobbing. She _is_ exactly on cloud nine."

I shrank more as I noted Jean was lucky and perfect. And so was Scott. Rogue snorted that it was bullshit.

I glared at her angrily, not knowing what to say, not knowing the answers, just feeling lost and impatient. "Okay, then I don't know. It's because she lo -" I trailed off, shock in my chest.

Rogue stared at me sadly and finished the sentence for me. "…loves Scott? Not like ya?"

I tried to pass it off with a joke that of course I wasn't in love with Scott. She snapped she meant I wasn't in love with Piotr. For a long minute I didn't find my voice. Finally I said I'd already known that, and in a way it was true. In the past few days I hardly even had any emotions towards anything. Only those diamond-hard, ice-cold walls that shut me away from any feelings and nothing could affect me. It was like all my previous satisfaction and self-confidence had worn off in the dullness of those days.

Rogue sighed unhappily. "I hate to break it to ya but I think Piotr isn't the one ya're in love with."

I looked at her puzzled, expectingly. I was caught off-guard by her statement. The world started reeling with me when she said the most incredible thing I could have ever imagined, and couldn't prepare for. She said maybe I still loved Lance. I wanted to say I hadn't even ever. I wanted to say it had only been a short-term infatuation but the words got stuck in my throat. Something began unfolding in me, and I shivered. She couldn't be right. I told her it was ridiculous. My voice was barely above whisper, and I was betrayed by my own tearful eyes. I covered my face, not wishing to deal with her words and with my uncertainty. I couldn't think straight anymore. I knew it wasn't love, it just couldn't be. It was only something indefinable that didn't let me go, and bound me to the past.

Rogue sank down next to me sympathetically, placing a comforting hand on my shoulder. She whispered softly as if it was a secret. "Ya might know ya keep dreaming of him."

I glared at her in disbelief, unable to say anything. It was somehow so absurd.

"Rarely, occasionally I wake up in the middle of the night to yer voice, mumbling indistinguishable words, but sometimes I clearly understand ya. Or at least one word that often appears. And it's his name. I've always known ya're not head over heels with Piotr. Just can't be if ya still dream of another man."

It was as if she was talking about someone else. I wanted to say, wanted to believe those dreams were only a trick of my mind, pulling out old, withered reminiscences from the depth of my memory. They wouldn't mean anything. I was openly sobbing. "It can't be, it just can't be."

I'd made a reasonable decision that I'd never regretted for a minute, and shouldn't even have because everything around me justified it. Rogue had to be wrong.

I never wished to have him back; nothing was worth the woe I left behind – actually, all along I pretended he hadn't even existed. I only missed the innocence of that era, the lost carefreeness when sometimes all seemed fun and games. There was nothing to miss in that relationship. In fact, we never had anything but stolen moments. Stolen from the X-men, stolen from the Brotherhood, from the school, the world, stolen even from each other. Slowly I'd got tired of it, tired of secret-mongering, plotting, hiding from everyone. I got sick of his inability to go out and stand up for our relationship in front of the world, and I got sick of my own inability and cowardliness of admitting my feelings for him to my teammates. There was nothing to be yearning for.

Hugging my legs, I buried my head between my knees and convinced myself all those dreams in the back of my mind were a precipitation of the fact that I was about to leave Bayville, and Lance was just as much the part of my past as anyone else at the mansion. Nostalgia had its weird and unpredictable ways. I just had to let him go, him and every fake thing we once had. And I had to put up with the fact that my love life lost all its teenage tone, that there was no fabulous, mysterious lifting sensation in real life that floats you in another dimension where nothing matters. I guess this is what they call growing up. Nobody ever said it would be easy.

Suddenly I was glad I had to go.


	7. Awakening

**A/N:** Lance's POV.

* * *

**Chapter 7: Awakening**

Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months and passed by in sameness. I was unleashed.

Losing all purposes in my life, even if as questionable as we'd gotten from Mystique, all orders, however revolting the Brotherhood golden rule '_do as told'_ was, cut the ground from under my feet. Mere survival couldn't motivate me any longer.

I was in a pitiful state. I was slowly, steadily destroying myself, chiseling off the last bits of humanity in a delirium that was more powerful than I'd ever been.

I had no idea where I ended up that night. Not as if it mattered. I couldn't even figure out who I was with. It never mattered either. I was in a state of wakeful unconsciousness, staring at nothing, thinking nothing, feeling nothing. Between the crumpled sheets next to me the chick was already long forgotten. All I wanted was a proper dreamless sleep, lying there like a dead till the next morning, evening, life. The bed was soft and it was warm in the room. More than enough for me.

"What's your name?" she moved up to a half-sitting position and lit a cigarette. I knew from its smell that it was one of the cheapest. I wanted a drag so much, to fill my windpipe with smoky tar crap and boost the statistics of people dying of lung cancer for the government. I really was a thoughtful citizen.

"Why the hell matters", I grumbled with hostility. I didn't want anything less than having an intellectual conversation with someone. Groaning, I turned on my side. Lying on your back isn't the best pose when you have a chance to throw up. And banging the heck out of that slut had twitched my alcohol-filled stomach in a very unpleasant way. Since when hadn't I eaten a decent meal? Or anything at all.

My precautions were soon proved right when she answered a question I never asked.

"My name is Kitty."

I retched. I had to sit up and clutch my mouth to prevent myself from vomiting. She cast me a nonchalant, vacant look. My head was reeling. It was like a slap on my face. I could only stare at the swollen, threadbare lips blowing yellowish grey clouds of smoke that had just uttered that sentence so apathetically, and I couldn't turn my head away. It's not that Kitty was a rare name. I just hadn't heard it aloud for months. Or at least not from someone else's mouth. I was suddenly dreadfully sober. How the hell could someone with a name like this be such trash of mankind? How old was she after all? Twenty? Forty? And how old was I?

She offered me her cigarette and my hand jerked for it merely out of habit. Then I caught sight of the ruby red blur her lipstick left on the end of the cig and I slapped her hand away in disgust. I felt like beating the crap out of her but I wished I could have been able to do it with myself. That was exactly what I deserved. A Kitty like that, not like the one I'd left behind in Bayville.

She didn't know and I as well was ungrateful towards her but she was the one and her name and her looks that eventually saved me from going down in the world definitely.

Strange as it is, I realized only then what I became. Or rather what I always was. There was no need for explanations, reasons and arguments anymore as to why Kitty dumped me in the first place. It was obvious now as daylight. Because she saw where I belonged to. She saw what lay under the surface, and she didn't want any of it. Not that I could blame her for it. I'd been rotten inside ever since my birth. It'd been a potential future hidden in me, it was only a question of time when it came to light. This was the way I always solved problems: by destruction, thinking if I bury them deep, if I crush them by force they would really disappear. Little did I know the splinters could hurt slyly and more than anything. I chose the easier way, the way for the weak and coward. In my life I surely always was damn good in running away from things I couldn't deal with.

I was disappointed; the bitter taste in my mouth became almost unbearable. Kitty made me be a different person or at least someone I hadn't known I could ever be, and without her guidance I made an about-face and headed back to where it all started and did it my own way, spoiling it all along the line.

I was snapped out of my months-long trance harshly and abruptly, and it didn't feel well. It was like being born again with all its pain, cold and strangeness. I wanted to change. Not for Kitty, not for the memory of our shot-to-hell relationship, not for the world. I wanted to prove _myself_ that she was wrong, that I could be better, I could take responsibility of my acts, I could be reliable. That she should have given me another chance.

I didn't set myself lofty aims like acceptance or respect, I had long given up on these – the closest thing to respect I'd ever had was that of Freddy or maybe Todd but that wasn't long-lived. I only wanted little things, first another shabby car, then renting an apartment on my own, regular meals, calm nights. I had to get a job, and actually try to keep it for more than a month. I knew I had to work hard for these, but working hard didn't turn out half as bad as I'd thought it would. Actually, it was far more appealing than starting to ponder over things that only scraped me from inside. It was, in fact, what prevented me from falling back again. I buried myself in it every day, every hour, waking up, going to work, then going home to sleep and the next morning starting it all over again, like a robot with a predefined program that keeps it moving and moving. I left no space for me to brood over anything more complex than choosing a menu at a fast-food restaurant.

And I wanted to forget her. Every tiny memory, every word and glance, erasing them like they never existed.

Without forgiving or accepting, though, without really being ready to let go, it was more than hopeless.

* * *

**A/N:** I'd really appreciate some reviews, whether you liked it so far, hated it, it's too dark, too boring, whatever. What d'you think of the structure, the first person or anything. Thank you^^


	8. Maze of bypast times

**A/N:** Kitty's POV.

* * *

**Chapter 8: Maze of bypast times**

My life at the university was full of challenges, and when I visited Bayville I wasn't bored either. I valued every minute I could spend with my friends and Piotr, and did everything to keep these relationships as close as possible even despite the distance. I studied hard, trained hard and every moment in my life was occupied. First it wasn't easy, but with time I got used to being here and there, always on the move, and in a way I enjoyed it. They said I became self-confident and determined, with clear mind and thoughts. Wolverine called me _General_ Half-pint sometimes.

I was in the kitchen at the mansion, lazily cutting an apple into fine, same sized slices. Only Rogue was in there. I saw her watching me from the corner of my eye. She made a habit of it whenever I came back to Bayville. I couldn't decide whether I liked this kind of wordless attention or it made me be fidgeting. We were just sitting there in silence as if we were strangers.

Finally she asked if I was happy. I was caught off-guard. I let down the knife in my hand and said a firm yes that I even believed to be true. She made a skeptical sound that made me add I was only tired because I got out of the habit of early morning sessions. I resumed slicing the apple but had to admit to myself it felt awkward to meet her gaze. Without being asked for it, I told her about my plans of visiting Russia with Piotr. I wanted to meet his sister I'd heard so much about. I talked about my ideas of meeting European teams and participating in overseas operations to fulfill the Professor's visions and help his plans. She glared at me blankly for an endless minute but other than that she didn't seem to pay much attention. After a couple of minutes she remarked I'd changed, an accusatory edge in her voice. I already didn't like where the conversation was heading.

For some reason I felt offended. "Rogue, if you wanna say something just say it!"

She stirred the spoon idly in her cereal bowl and shrugged. "No, that's all."

When I spoke, my voice was somewhat explanatory. "Of course I've changed. Everyone changes. It'd be strange if I were my old self. We're getting older."

Rogue remained silent for a minute. She looked distracted as she said she'd dreamt about the Cajun the other night. I was surprised by the sudden change of the subject but honestly I didn't mind it. "Really? And?"

She shrugged again that it was all. I didn't understand. I began to peel the apple slices without thinking, not hungry for it anymore.

"Do ya think there is any sense in thinking back of the past?" she asked, staring out the window.

I shook my head in confusion but replied nonetheless. "Not much. Let bygones be bygones."

Suddenly she faced me and asked why I then always looked back. I blinked. My face fell. She was right. She got me, she knew me too well.

I bowed my head. Seconds passed. Movement of wrist, smooth slide of the knife, slender scroll of apple skin.

"Because sometimes it'd be just so good, so simple to be that old Kitty again, living a teenage girl life with all its fun, ridiculous quarrels and all that jazz. Teasing Kurt, doing homework…"

"…fighting the Brotherhood."

The knife slipped and I cut my finger. None of us spoke for a minute. Taste of blood in my mouth. A sinking feeling in my heart. "You can still fight them", I noted silently.

She said matter-of-factly that not all of them. I struggled for my voice. I felt dazed.

"No, not all. Less problem", I nodded, waitingly. Maybe challengingly. Rogue didn't answer for long. Only the soft ticking of the kitchen clock could be heard. Tick-tack. And the throbbing of my heart. It almost hurt in my chest.

I steeled myself for a name, for _his_ name to be heard. Months have past since I'd heard it last time. A whole new life past. I wanted to unravel the trembling, tense sensation in my stomach. I was probably curious whether his name would stir anything inside me. It shouldn't have.

Maybe inside, deep inside when I was weak, when I was so alone and so honest to myself, sometimes that name occurred to me again. But never aloud. Somehow I had the feeling if I'd said his name aloud that would create something, it would bring back something that was long gone and lost and buried. Something that I didn't need anymore. Since that Sunday morning Lance's name hadn't come up between us, not that I minded it, then I went to university and rarely met Rogue. We behaved as if that scene hadn't even happened.

I wanted to jump up and escape the kitchen before Rogue would say that name out but remained motionless, pinned to the chair with snake-like fruit skins and crunched apple slices in front of me. Crimson drops of blood on my finger.

"Yeah", Rogue replied with apathy. And that was all she said.

And deep inside for some reason I was disappointed, not relieved that she didn't tell anything more. Eventually that was what made me stand up and walk away. I couldn't stand the silence and his name missing from there, couldn't stand the faint tick-tack, tick-tack, and the abating race of my heart. I was disappointed for I couldn't hear his name again, and was disappointed in myself for that disappointment. Wasn't it ridiculous? Wasn't it pathetic?

Maybe I had to stop blaming him, stop having a grudge against him, so it'd make him completely gone. I kept telling myself I shouldn't feel bad about him, he was neutral, he didn't matter. There was no sense anyways in being angry with him for sticking to his lunatic friends and being an idiot himself, having bad temper and an equally bad attitude. It wouldn't change anything. And never did.

Suddenly an uneasy thought crept in my mind. If he wasn't all like this, he'd have been called Scott Summers, and stopped being everything that was Lance Alvers. I didn't dare ask me the question whether it really was what I'd wanted from him all along. Whether I'd have liked him that way.

It didn't matter anymore.

Forgiving. Letting go of old hurts and failed expectations.

I reckoned this would be the first step towards erasing him from my mind. But maybe it was the first step towards something completely different.

* * *

**A/N: **In the next chapter something will happen that changes this state of constant misery of the characters. On a second thought, the misery might remain, but it will be a change nonetheless. So hold on! :)


	9. Frozen grains in a sandglass

Now a bit of change in the "plot".

**A/N:** Lance's POV.

**A/N#2:** Quote is from Batman: Begins!

* * *

**Chapter 9: Frozen grains in a sandglass  
**

_Why do we fall?  
__So that we can learn to pick ourselves up._

I can say I pulled myself together as much as it was possible. I tried to fix what was broken but I think I only covered the cracks, lame solution putting band-aid on a wound when what you really need is stitching it up.

I moved into another rat-hole in the most infamous district of the city but I guess, in fact, it was me who they had to fear, even if I hadn't used my powers for quite a while. I kept the flat almost empty, all I needed was a bed, everything else was considered extra. I led the simplest life possible. I didn't even make friends and wasn't really yearning for it. I knew from experience any attachment goes hand in hand with pain and loss. I wanted to spare me that misery this time. I had a few pals at work who I spent the lunchtime with or would occasionally go out on Saturday evenings but I didn't let these go deeper.

From the outside maybe I seemed reserved, always obedient, resigned and undoubtedly insensitive. The latter I surely was. Nothing could touch me anymore in this new world. I was able to control my temper only because no one meant that much that they could piss me off. I had my own everyday routes with arrows showing the direction I'd set up for myself so I wouldn't forget where to go, what to do and everything outside this territory was neutral. Maybe even unseen. Wake up. Keep walking. Keep living. Breathe. Thankfully these consumed all my energy so nothing left for the _whys_ and _what fors_.

My boss was a quite nice man; I assume he was only till he'd somehow figure out what I was. And then he surely wouldn't be my boss any longer. Mutants were still the game in a wicked hunting-season. I was glad I was out of sight this time. The weight of being controlled and degraded to a brainless living weapon and being responsible for a team of idiots summoned for none less than taking over the world was lifted off my chest. No more disappointments on either side of the game, I didn't have to prove allies I was bad enough for them, and no need to prove the other side I wasn't that bad news at all. I didn't have to decide _inside_, no need to convince myself of which I, in fact, was.

I fell into the habit of sizing up all my acts and achievements, no matter how simple or insignificant they were, and tried to imagine what Kitty would say about them, if she would approve or disapprove them. It was a sick habit but as torturing as it appeared in a way, it helped me keep my feet on the ground. After two fucking years gone I still couldn't compare anyone to her. And couldn't stop dreaming of her. It's not something you can control. In fragile nights, in idle hours, against my own will I left the safety of my well outlined territory and suffered by these visions more than in all the other hours of the day. And ironically I felt more alive too. Kitty. She had burnt into my mind, my skin and retina like a mark of a branding iron – I was still her possession, no matter how I hated being that, no matter how I wanted to hate her for everything she'd done and never cared to do to me.

I lived like that for months, not really sensing the passing of time. Days, weeks, months blurred into each other, snow, rain, sunshine, rain and snow again, circle of life that I wasn't the part of. Life went by almost unnoticed for me and it was fine with me. Safe.

One day I found a mail on the floor. It had been slipped in under the door. My heart skipped a beat when I opened it and recognized the scribble on the spot. For a minute I seriously considered throwing it out without reading and just held it unfolded in my hand, unsure and too weak to move, feeling the onrush of memories, gone funs and rows, and I couldn't deny the onrush of longing. I read it and put it away in a failed attempt to forget it, and I even pretended I managed to for long, long weeks. But the memory of affinity despite being as twisted as we had in the Brotherhood left emptiness in me that wasn't something you can easily ignore. The tension was building and building inside me till I couldn't deny it anymore, and it tipped me over in my little world and threw me off balance. They wrote they'd found me by chance. They wrote they'd never stopped trying it. I always believed they didn't think of me just because in their place I would have forgotten myself and maybe I really_ did_ do it too - not because _I _had forgotten them, not even for a week. It made me feel better and worse at the same time.

I said to myself I did it to close a bygone period of my life. To really close it and wave it goodbye. I lied to myself that it should help, it'd make it easier. But actually the truth was I did it because I unintentionally always tended to torture myself. It was like a daily training, drowning myself in misery till the last possible minute when it still wasn't irreversible.

So I went back to Bayville. Christmas was a good excuse for it.

*

Driving down those streets, turning the same old corners and passing by the familiar buildings along the roads made me feel weak and groggy. Dreamlike scenes, faces, colors and shapes.

The Brotherhood house didn't change a bit, or rather didn't improve. It was like time had stopped on its tracks long time ago, and everything was the same as when I left, only I changed and seemed to be unable to rewind myself back to those times, to my old self of those days.

I was glad Mystique was off again. The guys were genuinely happy to find me on the threshold, and for a minute everything seemed to be as in the old times. Only for a minute. They said I should have stayed and let them help me out of whatever had driven me away. I guess only Wanda understood the truth of the old phrase that in pain and death we are alone. I told them that there were times when it was just easier to run away from things and for me it was that kind of time. I couldn't stay long in the house let alone my old room where every tiny crack in the walls, every piece of furniture looking the same, occupying the same place reminded me of how different I became. How out of place. I don't think the guys understood why I moved to the downtown instead of staying there with them but didn't object to my decision. I meant no offence. I _wanted_ to be the part of it again, I _tried_ to but something was missing from inside. Something I'd lost during the long drive from Bayville two years earlier and its absence rattled horribly in me.

I hiked around the city, slowly losing all layers of the past years that had wrapped around me ever since I left and made every memory faded and less painful. Every step was sore and bitter now, full of yearning, full of feeling lost. I didn't belong here but neither belonged anywhere else. I walked up to the city park like a sleepwalker, wandering around among the skeletons of trees I'd known so well. _We'd_ known so well. We'd known how good a hiding-place they provided in the storm of accusations and suspicions between geeks and hoods in which there was no place for us. This was our sanctuary.

Significant events happen on the most ordinary days, and you don't have the faintest idea how huge impact they're going to have on your fate later. They hit you like a meteor, leaving a crater in your life. Mine fell on me from a closed locker, serious punishment for a little truancy, and sometimes I wish it hadn't left more track behind than a ridiculous red line across my face. I wish all pain it caused was my efforts of getting rid of it in the restroom. But at that very second somehow somewhere deep in the back of my mind I'd already known that those eyes would haunt me till the end of my life. God knows how right I was. At that dizzy moment I hadn't planned to use her as I used her later, hadn't even had the idea that I could ever make any profit of her. But as always I spoiled everything and all was shot to hell in a fraction of second because I was a fool and I'd never imagined how deep it would run, what dependence, what anger it'd evoke later. I'd never suspected that after definitely losing her I'd burn down and die.

I sat on a bench, wishing to steal a moment of peace from the nature around me. To no avail. I was again the odd one out here - I had thunders roaring inside me while cool breeze swayed bare branches, I had lightnings in my chest while unharmed blanket of snow was shimmering peacefully as far as the eye could reach.

That was when fate bumped into me for the second time, wearing the same face as before, but this time I did challenge it.

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_Those of you who happen to read this fic, I'd really like to see your comments, whatever it would be about^_^_


	10. The most painful thing

After a little break in the Middle-East, I'm back with the story. Here you go.

**A/N:** Kitty's POV.

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**Chapter 10: The most painful thing**

Another year was gone. Winter holidays always were fun in Bayville. At least for us. For Wolverine it was another occasion for considering the needs of private tanks. I had two weeks for staying in Bayville before mostly everyone left to spend Christmas with their respective family. This year the mansion was expected to be a bit more crowded as Jean decided to stay with Scott instead of going home and Hanukah fell on late December too so I wasn't going home either. Not to mention that we had a new recruit in the person of Gambit which made not only Rogue but also Piotr more than glad since the two men for some reasons always got along well, and the Cajun's presence made him feel less lonely. It's not like Piotr wasn't in good terms with the others; it's just he sometimes couldn't shake off his reserve so easily. Of course, not when I was concerned. I think we understood each other quite well, especially after I had visited his family in Russia. Being beside him was like tying up in a safe haven and I was thankful for it. I felt a bit downhearted when he travelled back home for the holidays and I was left behind with my books and essays to write. I was already sophomore and it wasn't a piece of cake. It was either a good and a bad thing that my friends did everything to make me forget the university and my duties there. It was exactly like in the old times, fierce snowball fights and reconstructions.

One day I accompanied Jean on her regular errand in the downtown. Everything was peaceful and calm when we crossed the park to catch the X-Van on the other side. Only the snow was crunching softly under our feet. Apart from a few people loafing around, the park was almost deserted. A lonely snowman was standing beside the path, eying us with glimmering pebble eyes. Suddenly I stopped dead, barely noticing Jean proceeding on her way. On a bench under the snow-covered branches of an oak, wrapped up in a thin jacket, there was no one else than Lance Alvers, Avalanche, former leader of the Brotherhood of Bayville.

I closed my eyes shut, fighting the shock wave coming over me, trying to process a thought amid the mad pulsation of my heart. I wished it was only a strange projection of my mind, I wished I was wrong and it wasn't him but deep inside I knew I'd recognize him even in the dark.

There are kinds of pain that can't be set free by a yell or tears. Pain that eats itself deep into the soul and body and heart. Pain that is too inconceivable to get shattered. Pain that moulds your face into stone and turns itself to be undetected from outside.

And pain that makes you so alone.

Moments went by, seconds or hours maybe, no wind was blowing, no sound was made by the horns and grating car-wheels, the park was mute, the world was mute and collapsed on me with all its weight noiselessly, with all the years gone by since our parting, with all the lost and squandered chances for happiness, everything that we could have been but never managed to and all the sins we committed against each other. Suddenly I could recall everything so clearly like it was a day before. Oh God, how desperately I wished there was no one on that bench when I opened my eyes. But there was.

I walked up to him in a kind of painful trance, every step made me bleed inside. He was watching me, his gaze intense and unreadable. I halted a few steps away from him, not daring go closer as if he'd disappear and I couldn't decide whether I still wanted him to do so. We didn't speak for a minute, my mouth was dry and my throat so tight that was almost choking. He was just staring at me from behind a curtain of dark locks, elbows resting on his knees, fingers bound together, long and cracked exactly how I remembered them, every small line in place, rough and beautiful.

"You're back…" I whispered finally. I didn't even realize how lame it sounded, noting the obvious. He didn't answer for a bit, only a wince around his eyes, a blinking of his eyelids. A hazel glint.

Then he remarked flatly, "Shit stuff always returns."

I was taken aback for a second. Suddenly I wanted him to yell, to snicker, to lose his temper, anything but this cold sarcasm. I wanted him to smile as if nothing had happened. As if we hadn't met only for a few days. His face was bitter and deadly ironic.

I stopped sensing the outer world. Something started to dawn on me, something huge and fearsome and unbearable that I still had no name for and what I had to fight before it swallowed me, but it was a losing game. I could only wonder how steady my own voice was, how automatically I questioned and answered, while sinking deeper and deeper with every word uttered by him, with the sound of his voice, glance of his eyes. Our gaze, our words intertwined into something beautiful, something right that shut out everything else and made them seem so senseless. I couldn't help but notice he appeared a way older, though his features didn't change too much. Something in his eyes made him distant and so lonely that I felt my heart ache. It was the same dead expression I'd seen in his eyes on that old rainy day when everything had begun. Or ended.

Later I couldn't remember how we finished talking, let alone how many seconds or minutes it took. I wished him a merry Christmas and left. I paced after Jean obediently, feeling no legs, no arms, nothing at all, only a throbbing sensation somewhere so deep inside that it was just impossible to be my own part though all my being was shaking with it. The world came to life again, interruptedly, loudly that hurt my ears, and I just didn't understand how the snow, the trees, the black-and-white faces on the castaway newspaper front pages could be so indifferent when I saw the walls bleeding, the earth crying under my feet upon leaving someone behind alone on a remote bench, someone who had crushed my little cute, promising life with soft kisses and husky whispers long, long before. I knew how he was staring at my back all along without looking back. I knew it because he would stare at me the same way after our meetings in those times when I would still look back at him. I was clearly aware that something came to an end and nothing would be the same ever again.

I was standing beside Jean at the curb, waiting for Scott, my head reeling, and all I wanted to do was running away until I fell on the ground so exhausted that I wouldn't be able to think. I wouldn't be able to remember.

"Don't tell them. There's no need for Scott complaining about it during the whole holiday as if it meant anything", I remarked, my voice brilliantly nonchalant but every syllable, every sound and word made me ache inside. She said I was right. I couldn't return her gaze, I stood there dumbly, looking around as if seeing the place for the first time.

The whole ride back home passed in a constant buzz for me. Jean asked me quietly if I was okay. I blinked at her as if not understanding what she was talking about. She commented I was so silent. I didn't want her to know what desperate a struggle was unfolding in me.

"I'm just tired. And my head is already full of this upcoming Computer science exam."

"It can't be so difficult", Rogue turned towards me. "I bet ya ace that class all right."

I was blathering something about the professor being strict and demanding but didn't pay much attention. I had to gather all my strength to hold a simple conversation, and I felt like screaming in agony if I had to continue it for long. "I don't feel like learning. I might just call Piotr when we get back."

I hated myself because I didn't mean it. I only wanted to say Piotr's name out loud. It was my last hope of getting pulled back to the ground, slapped out of the haze but his name echoed in me emptily and strangely. Two years with him shriveled up like paper in the fire. I glared out the window. The city had changed in a heartbeat as if it'd undressed. I didn't see the people walking there. I saw myself and I saw Lance lurking in the shadows like sinners. Memories kept flashing through my mind. All buildings, all streets were conveying our scenes from the past, the trace we'd left behind, facades and parks came to life again like a screen in the movies, filling my head with the pictures of our ill-fated relationship. I was wondering where they'd been all along. Were they always here, I was just too blind to see them? Too persistent to pretend blindness? Why was the whole world reflecting, reminding me of the love I never really had?

I couldn't take it any longer. At the gates I phased out of the car insisting that I needed fresh air. I let the X-Van proceed on its way and I stumbled across the courtyard blindly, not watching where I was going and not even caring about it. I felt numb inside to process a single rational thought. I lay down in the snow, wishing to turn into ice so nothing would hurt and wouldn't have to name the feeling overflowing me that I still didn't want to name. Because so I had to admit how wrong my cold and reasonable calculations were. How fake my new life was.

"Kitty, what's wrong?" Jean came after me, obviously worried. Rogue was behind her, confusion on her face. I couldn't stand either, I didn't deserve it.

It burst out of me desperately. "I failed, Jean, I failed." I wanted to cry, God knows how I was yearning for a little bit of fake sense of relief but couldn't. What I wanted to release wasn't something I couldn't endure, wasn't something I hated. It made me hot inside, and every second of the past years, every advantage of my new life, every tender moment with Piotr, every weak resistance and reasoning melted away achingly in its flood.

Jean said encouragingly that I still hadn't even written the exam. I glared at her, completely lost and dazed.

"Who cares about that damn test? I… I thought I-" I couldn't continue, couldn't say it out loud because everything would have collapsed on me._ I thought I'd got over him but I hadn't._

I glanced at Rogue resigned and defeated. "You were right. All along." She stared at me, trying hard to find out what I was talking about, and I stammered, "He's back, he's here."

For a minute she didn't even react. In the same second both of them seemed to understand finally. Rogue's face turned into bitter sympathy as she stepped closer, and I clung onto her desperately. "I'm so sorry, Kitty, so sorry…"

I could tell from her voice that Jean was utterly stunned when she told me if I was confused and upset because of Lance's return it was quite natural. I let her think that and just shook my head and buried my face into Rogue's scarf, hoping I could bury that feeling deep enough to carry on. The feeling that already had a name. And it made me speechless.

Loving him was the most painful thing on earth.

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_Thanks for the reviews_.


	11. Ropes

I forgot to update... Sorry for the mistakes, this one has more than any before, I guess.

**A/N:** Lance's POV.

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**Chapter 11: Ropes**

I had thought I was prepared for it. For seeing her again. For hearing her again. Deep inside I even hoped I would realize I had been clinging onto a mere memory, a mere dream that only beautified what I actually had and it's never been anything I should be yearning for. But the realization hitting me was the old sinking feeling of losing someone. And losing them all over again.

Every word and minute in the park rusted me like acid inside.

She was moderate, polite to the ways like to someone she'd been in quite good terms with but somewhat shallowly. I didn't want to think of how close she had been to me. Closer than anyone ever. And I didn't want to believe that it was only a deception from my side that I'd been close to her too. I couldn't shake off the feeling that she'd never really seen me, no matter how many times I managed to fool myself that she had. Partially it was my fault. Exposing the human, fragile side of me wasn't something I could easily do. And this whole superhero bullshit didn't help it either; while we were becoming soldiers, we slowly forgot how to be honest. Speaking of honesty, I still believe I was the only one for a long time who she didn't have to lie to; and I was also the one because of who she had to lie to everyone else. And instead of forging us together, it set us apart.

In the park it wasn't the Kitty who had said she didn't want to see me again. When I'd thought of her those years, she always wore that cold, alienated face that I hated so much, that made me run amok. The one that conveyed I was nothing for her. No matter how hard I tried to think of the times when she could look at me in other way, all I could remember was the day when she pushed me out of her life. I don't know whether it would have been better if she was that Kitty this time. Just to be a reminder that I shouldn't enter the swamp of wild hopes.

I kept searching for our trace on her face, in her eyes but all I could see was what a perfect and whole life she had led without me. I could only see what an ugly obstacle I had been for her. She went on with her life, grew confident and more beautiful while I died every freaking minute. All those days I had spent far from her seemed to be a useless struggle.

After she left I stayed on the bench for hours, frozen and stonelike like a gargoyle, annihilated. I was full of conflicting emotions that mixed together into a hateful, maddening mass and I couldn't think straight, couldn't give names to those feelings, thus sorting them out was impossible. I finally set off for home because loving her and hating her at the same time engulfed me in an unbearably painful way, tore me into sheds inside, and I wanted to believe in the faint illusion that it would ease if I walked till I couldn't move a finger anymore, out of the world.

The guys told me about the big Russian who used to be Magneto's man but now belonged to Xavier's crowd. Everyone surely was very satisfied that they could completely convert him, turn him into an obedient X-man. I had a bitter taste in my mouth. It was something I never managed to do. Something I failed in. I suppose it was the only way it could work. Now he could peacefully be with Kitty. There were no suspicions, no accusations, no pointing fingers at one another. No attempts to make them apart. I whould really like to know if he had to fight all those accusations I had to, but somehow I doubt it. We always had this thing with Summers about kicking each other's ass that ruled out every rational thought in our heads. I wonder if being an X-man would have been enough. This was all it takes? Giving up everything I was for Xavier's sublime, majestic dreams, believing in, fighting for his purposes? Joining the queue, so I could fit their conception of an appropriate partner for one of them? Losing everything I was? Even if I wasn't anything worthful, No, I couldn't be a puppet in a venomous and obscure game again.

I was hanging around places where she'd most definitely show up. I didn't plan to speak to her. Not even going near her. It was a form of dependence. A daily dose I needed to carry on though I was fully aware of what kind of an irreversible damage it was causing in me. Balancing over the edge of a chasm. Tightrope walking, blindfolded, and knowing from experience how deep I could fall. I think I wanted to see her with that tin-brained Russian. It would have been something like an electroshock therapy, intended to burn this toxic affection out of me. I knew if I wanted the best for myself I would have left as long as it didn't grow fatal. But I was always lousy in knowing what the best thing to do was.

I caught sight of her only once. She was with her friends, letting them drag her along the streets. And I was spying from the shadows like a menace, like I did years before when in a fateful summer I got in my head that I undeniably wanted her, no matter we were enemies. No matter she hated me more than anyone, and honestly, not undeservedly. Mystique had been gone then and I was in charge. And I decided. I could have spared me so much misery if I stayed out of her way, if I resisted that incredible urge.

And I would have spared me the only moments of happiness in this crappy life…

All those ropes that had spun around us in the very first moment and all along pulled me closer and closer to her still existed, I felt them, they cut into my flesh, they were invincible and immortal.

And they were bleeding.


	12. Walls we hide behind

**A/N#1: **Kitty's POV.

**A/N#2:** Lyrics 'Blindfold' by Morcheeba.

_Thanks again, Novice, for your nice comment! And all of you who faved this story!^_^_

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**Chapter 12: Walls we hide behind **

_Streets feel strange…  
__I feel out of place  
__Just look at my face  
__Stuck in the mud  
__Knee-deep in blood  
__Eyes, blind fold_

I couldn't find rest after our encounter in the park. I was disorganized and whimsical, often lost in thought so much that I sometimes found myself sitting in the same place for hours without a single idea about what had been going on around me. I was waiting for something to happen, to dawn on me and help me decide what I really wanted. It was a struggle I didn't know the purpose of, I didn't see what I should defeat and how. Something in me was dying, and something was being born.

I'm sure I made most of my friends puzzled as to what caused the rapid change in my state of mind. I didn't mention Lance to anyone else. I held dear the feeling that had rushed over me that day, and kept it to myself. His once more occupied place in me was sore and warm at the same time, and I clung onto it, snuggled closer to it like someone trembling from cold, even if its flames burnt me. Those days were a frantic surge of happiness and anxiety, I was tossed around, rebounded off the walls of denial and need, selfishness and edginess. I felt sick and weak, a shivering, strange tension arose in my chest trying to stretch it out and I didn't find enough power in me to fight and finish it.

I wanted to see him again so much that the yearning became almost alive and organic.

One time on the way home I even asked the cab driver to make a detour and drive past the Brotherhood house. I hadn't been around that place for years, and I have to admit to myself that it was on purpose. I glared out the window, feeling the tension rise in me up to a point where it became unbearable. I pressed my face against the cold glass, watching the trees go by, counting the corners and lampposts along the streets, knowing exactly as much how many miles and poles and cracks in the pavement we had to pass by as if I had been around the day before. I caught a glimpse of the old, crumbly walls and smiled. There was an unfamiliar car in front of the porch. I knew it must have been Lance's. I wondered what had happened to the old Jeep he treasured so much, and for a moment even I missed it a bit. In that minute I wished I could not only walk through walls but see through them too. He was in there, so close, so painfully close. I let the driver proceed on, bringing me farther from Lance, making me feel empty and useless.

I went along with my friends wherever they planned to go so I wouldn't have to stay in my room where I was so easily lured into wallowing in memories and staring at the picture for I had ransacked my drawers the other day. The old snapshot of us we'd made at the mall. I hadn't taken a look at it since we separated. We were so light-hearted then, so innocent and sinful at the same time. His rare, genuine smile reached his eyes and painted them brighter and vivid, making him look even more handsome.

Scott took us to the mall to get lost in the middle of the usual Christmas rush when I noticed him entering a diner. My heart skipped a beat before starting pounding madly again as if willing to make up for that tiny intermission. I stopped dead on my tracks, fighting for the control over my own body.

"Are you alright?" Scott asked.

I shuddered at his voice. "Yes, I just I -" I was suddenly cold and weak. I had to lean against the wall. Somehow my whole being was pulled out of my body and towards the diner where Lance had disappeared from sight. Millions of thoughts rushed over my mind and raided it. I had to answer honestly what I really wanted. What I really cared for. And there was no denial anymore.

I stared at my friends. "I'm gonna hunt for presents. See you later."

Scott and Kurt only gaped at me. I hurried away, walking round a block of shops just so they wouldn't see where I was heading. The old deception was still running in my blood.

I entered the diner, letting my eyes adjust to the dim lights. He was sitting in the back, slowly whirling a glass of water among his fingers. I froze there in the middle of the aisle between the small tables, watching him blend in the shadows, head lowered, eyes unseen behind his hair. Always hiding behind it. He seemed so lonely, so broken. I was nervous. I didn't know what to say, how to behave and it was unusual. I had never had to figure out a role to play before. Never with him. Everything had happened so naturally, no feigning, no beating about the bush. I missed that confidence, that bond between us. I stepped to his table and asked quietly if I could sit there.

He tossed his head, the expression in his eyes didn't follow the movement so quickly, I could see his previous emotions passing by. The same touch of being lost he'd always had in the off-periods of our relationship. But it was only for a heartbeat long. He blinked and with that every feeling was washed away. He gave me the once-over coldly and for a long minute my stomach turned stone because he seemed contemplating a refusal.

"Go ahead", he shrugged eventually, gesturing towards the free seat opposite him.

There was a long pause when neither of us spoke, and I felt he wasn't even willing to.

"So how long you're staying?" I asked, trying hard to sound casual.

"Two more weeks", he barely moved his lips. Fingers tightened around the glass in a death grip.

"So you stay for the holidays?"

"That's what the guys tracked me down for."

"Tracked?" I echoed, puzzled. "You mean you weren't in touch with them?"

He just shrugged, his lips forming a stubborn, recalcitrant line.

"But why?"

He stared at me somewhat quizzically yet all the same sternly, his jaw tensing. "When I shove off, there's always wreckage left behind. Whenever I leave I try to completely leave. Of course, sometimes the crap just comes back and turns into a huger wreckage", he remarked objectively. I knew he was referring to our disastrous last hour in Northbrook and the even more unfortunate reunion in Bayville. I tried not to show how it felt that he deemed us wreckage. He leaned on his elbows, the shadows shifting on his face. "Never look back. Remember? I used to tell you that. But you still do, don't you?"

His intense gaze swept over my face omnisciently, and I blushed at the truth of his words. He still knew me the way only Rogue did. I absent-mindedly span the saltcellar in my hand and brushed his comment off with remarking soothingly with a smile he didn't return, "Well, the guys surely missed you anyways."

"Yeah it seems they did", I couldn't mistake the light emphasis on the second half of the sentence, and fidgeted.

The waiter came there with Lance's order and asked me if I wanted anything. I shook my head. I doubted I could force anything down my throat when even speaking didn't go without effort.

"And where have you been since… then?"

He glared at me again, clearly conveying disbelief that I wanted a friendly chat here. In answer he crossed his arms, making obvious he didn't want to talk much about it. "Taking over the world", he grunted. "Bayville's the next."

I didn't let myself diverted by his attitude. Leaning forward I asked where he was living currently.

"Far enough from here", he growled, stabbing the fork in a potato and missing it. He crouched back in the chair, staring at me from the shadows, his eyes glinting coldly. That minute he reminded me more of Quicksilver than himself. "And how you're doing with the Terminator?"

I winced. Not because he called Piotr a name but because he already knew about us and was willing to mention him. Piotr was the last I wanted to talk about, I wanted to _think_ of, so I shrugged in reply and shrank up slightly as I added he was in Russia visiting his family. Now he was firmly in the saddle. Strange, unknown fight was unfolding between us that I hated to the core.

"You managed to recruit him, now Xavier and all of you must be glad that you have a new member as a bonus. So I assume things between the two of you are all peachy keen, nah?" Lance remarked cruelly. It hurt.

"It's nothing like that at all! If it works it's not because he's an X-man now but… because… " I faltered, feeling horror creeping on me. The problem wasn't that I didn't know why it worked. I didn't know _if it_ _worked_ at all. Not now. Not when I was sitting opposite Lance.

"Because he's good enough?" he pursed his lips cynically. I gaped at him, and couldn't believe we were at it again.

I bowed my head, unable to see this new face of him I hadn't seen before. "It'll go cold", I remarked quietly, nodding toward his food. His hand jerked for the fork but as on a second thought he clutched the glass instead and took a defying sip. His lips formed a firm line as he stared at his plate. Long seconds went by emptily. I was watching him openly, unable to tear my gaze off his face, binding every line in memory. An impatient jerk of his head, the falling back of his locks, covering his eyes, those eyes, and I was waiting, waiting for him to look up, to meet my gaze as intensely as ever before, making me melt inside and float, drift away.

"What do you want anyways?" he asked suddenly. I glanced at him, not sure how to answer it even to myself. Our gaze met, linked together, his slowly softening, losing the bitter edge. I wanted to touch his face, the clear-cut cheekbones and strong jaw line that always made his face look a bit older and more mature than his actual age. But I didn't dare.

"I don't know", I admitted softly. His brows winced.

"How uncharacteristic", he snorted, turning back to the plate but this time he started eating, shutting me out, pulling up his shields again.

I wanted to ask so many things. I wanted to know if he hated me, if he was happy in his new life, if he found someone – at this point my stomach turned upside down and I was strangled by pure jealousy – but I decided I didn't have the right to do so.

We didn't talk more. I was watching him eat, strong movements of his wrist, not returning my gaze even for a minute as if I wasn't there at all. I hated these walls between us that never had been there, not even after Northbrook. How ironic I could walk through any walls but was held back by this one – the one I wanted to penetrate the most.

Suddenly I noticed my friends outside in the corridor, and it pulled me down back to reality. I pushed the chair back. "Um, I better go now."

He didn't even turn around upon saying with cold, pure sarcasm, "Before your friends see you hanging around with me?"

It twitched my heart and froze me solid inside because it was our history again.

"No, I… See you around, Lance." I stood up hurriedly and rushed out without a glance back, rushed out before I had to lie to him. I had a piercing, pulsating pain inside. Something broke into pieces. Something fake, something hypocritical.

I caught sight of my reflection in the plate glass of a shop window and barely recognized my own bewildered face. Lance stirred me up with being stand-off and hostile to the way that I was scared that I might not find the old Lance under the surface of this new one who was a stranger to me.

I was afraid that who I wanted to see again didn't exist anymore.


	13. Back to square one

**A/N:** Lance's POV. Surely full of non-English sentences XD. Sorry for that, still, hopefully you can understand them.

_Thanks for the comments!_

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**Chapter 13: Back to square one**

The other day Pietro asked me whether I had met Kitty. He said I was walking around wearing the old brooding-over-her face that always gave me away. He remarked I hadn't changed much in that aspect. It made me disappointed. I knew he thought it was pathetic, and it didn't make it any easier that he was quite right this time.

The meeting at the diner was still clattering in my chest like a loose bolt, trying to find its place in the mess. Defining the proper shelf where I could store it was beyond me. I couldn't figure out what she wanted. She'd been sitting there, watching me like we hadn't separated like two strangers. Like she didn't deem me white trash.

Once she'd told me when she was a child she'd used to bring home all kinds of animals; birds fallen out of their nest, cats from beside dustbins, frogs and stray dogs. Her father had a hard time getting her out of this habit. Stray dogs. I might be one of them who she wanted to save. She might have realized her mistreatment towards me and wanted to make up for it. The only thing she forgot was that stray dogs might bite. And their bite is rabid. She didn't like being angry with anyone. Being in bad terms for a long time. Once she said it'd wear her out, make her tired both physically and mentally. To me it gave strength in a twisted way. To her it took her strength away like a poison. Maybe it indeed was poison.

If she'd asked me to be friends, I think I'd have just snapped. In a way I wanted her to do so, so I'd have every right to be angry and drive her away, to shout at her, releasing the frustration building up in me for years. If she expected me this, it'd have been just another proof that she never knew me well – a low blow that most definitely would have knocked me out.

If she wanted to feel better about herself, lift the weight of some kind of guilty conscience off her chest, I wasn't the right person for it to start with. It was all or nothing game, no chance for a mild middle course of an oh so keen friendship. Not by offering me a few polite words so she could create a false imagination of us getting along like in the old times. What we once had was more essential to me than being able to wipe it away so easily.

And still, it was so painfully hard to defy the urge to just give in and play whatever role she wanted me to take on. Suppressing what ifs and hopes was the hardest of fights when she was so ambiguous. It was like being ripped in two, constantly coming up against myself. The rational, survivor part of me that had been embittered in the whirl of hopes and failures, mistreatment and contempt so much that it didn't have any more illusions about the world and people, played a protective wall for the other part, the sentient being which was capable of rage and love, ruled by emotions, blind and vulnerable, and might destroy everything, even itself in the process. Destructive and incontrollable just like my powers. There had been times when I was nothing but that beast, fed with anger and desire, and didn't want to be it again. Because it would remember all the hurt and still feel each one of them. Strange, how difficult it was to hold it in leash every time Kitty appeared in my life.

Then everything seemed to have a turnabout the day when I happened to choose the exact same grocery store as someone I least wanted to come across. Reservedly, I nodded to Summers as I tried to pass him. He froze in the entrance, dumbfaced and stunned.

"Alvers. You're back."

He was still Mr. Obvious. "Seems so. Blue", I nodded to Wagner coming out after Summers.

He gasped appalled, "Avalanche!" I always had a shining popularity.

"Ain't no more. If you excuse me", I made my way between them. That codename stirred something up in me. I hadn't thought of it ever since I left Bayville and it was like talking about someone else who didn't have anything to do with me. When I came out of the store they were still at the curb. Putting the bottle of water under my arm, I cast a nonchalant look at them and proceeded on my way. At the trash can I opened up a box of cigarette. Rustle of cellophane, flash of the tiny flame, I closed my eyes against the wind, taking a long drag, exhaling, inhaling. So simple. I wished everything was just as simple as this.

"Alvers?" Shades followed me. My eyes shot open, old reflexes reviving.

Turning around, I eyed him warily. "Been waiting for me? How flattering."

He halted a few steps away, and gazed at the cigarette. "You smoke?"

"Want one?"

"No, thanks. I'm not bored of living", he remarked, cocking an eyebrow of disapproval.

"Good for you," I snorted. "What do you want, Summers? If one of those pathetic fights, then save it. I've grown."

He remarked he could see it. He pushed his hands in his pockets. In that moment he looked like me in the old times. We remained in silence, me curious of what he wanted to say and a bit amused at his astonishment that I didn't attempt to shred him into pieces on the spot. "So you're back with the Brotherhood then?"

"I'm back to visit old pals, to be precise." I let him digest the information the way he wanted to. After another long silence he suddenly asked me if I had met Kitty.

My eyelids winced. Gritting my teeth and thinking back of Pietro's remark, I shrugged. "If so?"

A knowing nod of realization as he noted, "Now it's clear why she's been so distracted recently."

"I always had a bad effect on her", I commented with a sardonic sneer. Suddenly I had enough of the whole scene. The mention of her name made me want to stay and flee at the same time. "Anything else?"

Summers shook his head, forehead softening above his glasses. "Merry Christmas, Alvers."

I stared at him for a second before returning the greetings and walking away without a glance back.

I don't think Summers had any idea what a tempest he caused in me. The thought of her thinking of me and being set off balance pushed my mind on a spiraling course. The tightly bound leash in my soul was stretched far beyond safeness.

I decided to go and grab something, and in the process I might as well sort out things but I think I just wanted to hide from the questions.

I never had a chance to do so.

When I entered the diner, she was in there, at the exact same table where I had been seated the previous time. I stood rooted to the spot, the incredibility of the scene got the better of me. I looked around for his friends but I was sure she was alone. The way she was sitting there, shoulders fallen, gaze downcast, she looked as if she'd been waiting for hours. Or doing so not for the first time. It was confusing. _Alienate her_, said a small voice in the back of my head. _Do it before she hurts you._ The voice of reason again. After all, I always considered myself a survivor.

"Lance", she looked up, a smile not so much surprised as happy spread across her face. Her eyes sparkling like in the old times. "Don't you wanna sit here?"

I stood there warily for a second, feeling the pull in my heart. And knowing too well the depth right before my feet. "Do I?"

"I hope so…" She watched me with a face that pretty much resembled a hopeful expression.

I felt stupid, like in a dream where you want to run but your leg wouldn't budge. I convinced myself it was far too late to just simply walk out without a glance back but in the back of my mind I knew it was a lie. I knew I couldn't live my life without playing with fire, without dancing at the edge of a chasm… without being around her even despite myself, so I sat down reluctantly.

"You're alone?"

"As usual", I remarked with a mixture of venom and sarcasm. Kitty didn't seem catching the hint. "I'm not stuck together with the guys if that's what you mean. I don't even live there", I added, not quite sure why.

"You're not living in the Boarding House? But why?"

I contemplated my answer but even more if I even should let her know how I felt. I decided to tell the truth. Not that it still mattered what she knew and didn't know about me. I shrugged, gaze darted at the ground. "Because I don't belong in there anymore. I feel out-of-place."

"Out-of-place", she repeated quietly, staring out the window for a moment, sounding like someone who finally found the word they'd been searching for. "But you're missing being one of them. Don't you?" She regarded me sadly, a knowing look on her face.

I stared at her, a once familiar feeling rising in me. "Being one of something. Yeah. Maybe. Or maybe not… Just the usual crap."

I leaned back in the chair, suddenly feeling the need to shut myself away from her and her prying, piercing eyes. This slight friction between our ways, meetings, glances and words finally stroke fire. Flames that had long since died out so much that I barely remembered their warmth lit up in me again.

But what they illuminated now was already deformed.

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_I'm gonna have a trip now, so the other half of the scene (the next chapter ) will be uploaded a f t e r I'm back . _


	14. My art of selfdeception

_Back from holiday, hurray, here's the update (the other half of the scene from the previous chapter). And thank you so much for the nice reviews and the faves!_

**A/N:** Kitty's POV.

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**Chapter 14: My art of self-deception**

"So is it just pure coincidence that you're here of all places in Bayville at this particular table or you're following me?"

I felt the heat rising to my face at Lance's question. He crossed his arms over his chest, being all distant and rejective. I mused what to say. In fact, I'd kept coming back to the diner at lunchtime and dinnertime in the previous days, as regularly as possible, so I might meet him. I could have maybe caught him exiting the Brotherhood House but my yearning didn't take me that far, leaving the diner as the only option. I think deep inside even I hadn't believed in its success until he suddenly showed up in front of me, looking disturbed and slightly irritated. He never liked surprises. At least it was one of those things we had in common.

I smiled vaguely at him. "I wanted to meet you again", I admitted honestly.

I saw him chewing the inside of his bottom lip. He had this habit when he was thinking hard of awkward and unpleasant things. I forced myself not to even consider if I meant any of them for him. After a long silence he simply asked me why. I shook my head. A question I wanted to answer at first to myself. A restless beast had come to life in me and everything was falling apart in its wake. It had an unappeasable hunger, scratching and twisting my whole being, and freezing it. I had to smash that cold inside but I had no clue how.

"Your return confused me. I want to straighten things out in my head."

"Good luck to that", his jaw tensed with hostility but his eyes seemed to betray him. It was that desperate, forlorn glint in them that I'd never been able to resist or even ignore. It was beyond me to understand how he could get to me so invincibly, how he turned me into someone I thought I'd left behind in between pink walls and movie star posters. He could still make me lose my common sense and rationality, everything lately I and others valued in me the most, without any effort at all.

I cracked a joyless smile. "I keep coming back to you. I wonder if it ever stops. I'm guessing it's still because of Northbrook. Even if for one day or two, you claimed a special place in my life and it never ceases being yours."

He visibly gritted his teeth. "Really? You seemed to forget it when you ditched me."

"I… I know. It's just… sometimes in the light of reality it was hard to remember all these things."

"Funny because I never stopped doing so."

His words cut deep. Or rather, the truth in them. He ruffled his hair impatiently, every dark lock rising and falling back, messy and soft, covering his eyes.

"Why are you telling me all these things?"

"If you want me to leave, just say it and I won't disturb you." I said quietly, evading the question and secretly fearing the worst.

I held my breath, watching him tensely and waiting. Lance looked away, slouching a bit against the back of chair. His hands balled into fists, knuckles turning white, I saw him struggle. I reached out and touched his fingers lightly. They felt so cold, still hadn't warmed up after the chill outside. His head shot up and he reluctantly withdrew his arms a bit; eyes again of a wounded animal.

"I'm sorry, Lance, if I hurt you. I didn't mean it", I whispered when he didn't give an answer but halted. A moment of silent thinking made me admit something I had never really admitted to myself. "No, that's not true. I did want to hurt you. But in fact I might have wanted to punish myself for not being able to make it work. For some reason I figured it was the best to do."

"Yeah, sure. For you at least", he said accusingly. I flinched at the tone of his voice and asked numbly if he was still mad at me.

He glanced at me silently and for long before uttering with much effort, "It's not like I could demand an explanation as to why you stopped feeling anything for me. I don't think you could help it. It doesn't make it any easier, though."

"Can you forgive me?" I almost pleaded. A headache was creeping in my head; my whole wreck of a world was depending on his answer.

He pondered his reply, fingers roughly massaging his temples, leaving red blurs on his skin. "I don't know, Kitty", he shook his head, closing his eyes for a minute. I could make the tiny blue capillaries out in his eyelids. He didn't meet my gaze, his voice was hollow when he tiredly remarked, "Being abandoned. Being betrayed. I know everything about these. It doesn't mean, though, I could learn to cope with it and live happily ever after."

I buried my face in my palms for a heartbeat. "I know. I know I hurt you the worst of ways. I was unfair to you."

Lance just peered at me, his face unreadable, and we were sitting there, drowned by memories, hurts and emotions that we saw being reflected in each other's eyes but couldn't mold them into coherent words. Once he'd said he always had trouble in hiding from me and I remember scolding him and stating he still did an annoyingly good job of it but this time I felt for sure I could peek through the tiny leaks on his shields. A warm somewhat possessive sensation came over me that I was probably the only person who he let closer to him. But that certain _probably_ was killing me.

"Have you found… do you have… you know…", I faltered, slightly embarrassed.

He raised an eyebrow, waiting. I bit my lip, gaze fixed on his face, trying to convey the question with a simple glance and I knew I couldn't wipe the hope off my face. He grimaced, "Do I have a _tin_ girl?"

First I shrank back by his half-ironic half-mocking words but eventually couldn't hold a chuckle back, even though I hated being reminded of Piotr. "So?"

He only huffed, suddenly losing heart. A jerk of his shoulders was his only reply.

"Does it mean yes or no?" I was persistent and eager. My curiosity that was closer to jealousy than anything else at that moment got the better of me.

He glared at me, clearly irritated, "It doesn't mean a thing, dammit."

"Wow, still man of few words you are."

Loud creak of a chair legs cut into the low buzz of the diner as Lance pushed himself away from the table. "It wasn't me coming here for a little chitchat", he stood up vehemently, and without realizing he hadn't ordered anything he threw money on the table and left.

I watched him paralyzed for an endless minute before hastily paying the bill and running after him. I don't know whether everything would have happened otherwise if I gave myself a little more time to think but my heart pushed me after Lance.

I caught up with him in the street outside the mall. It was already getting dark. I called out his name gently, affectionately.

He whirled around, both surprise and uncertainty on his face. "Why are you stalking me?" he asked, sounding more desperate than annoyed.

"Paying back a debt", I faintly tried to tease him. "I might as well _shake_ some things up."

He groaned, "Low blow. I guess it serves me right."

I could only smile at his expression. For a minute he was his old self again.

"Have you sometimes thought of me in the past two years?" I asked quietly.

"You mean have I ever _stopped_? Not for a day", he remarked a bit gruffly. At this point my heart raced with an almost unhealthy pace. He pressed his lips together, clearly pissed that he just let it slip and gave himself away so easily. "And you? Have you ever _started_?" he looked at me bitterly, seemingly sure about the answer.

I clutched at my scarf for strength. "Actually, I have, Lance. I have."

He glared at me, questions running through his eyes. Our breath foggily swirled and floated between us, intertwining and fading away. Cold wind swept along the street. The way he was watching me from behind his hair, eyes in flames of raw emotions, pure craving drawing lines around them, in that very minute I was sure he still had feelings for me, as intense as before.

"And where does it lead us?" he asked almost solemnly.

I stepped close enough to him to place a hand on his elbow. It was more like a grab, though, grasp of someone about to fall. "Wherever we want to head to."

He looked at me puzzled, and pushed his hands in his pockets, an oh so familiar movement. "I'm not sure if I want to head to anywhere." His words, stance and face conveyed rejection but his eyes were so soft, so full of loneliness that the mere sight wrenched my heart.

"Are you afraid of me?"

"Yes", he said but the corner of his lips twitched ever so slightly.

"It must be the haircut. I know it's menacing", I joked weakly. He turned his head away, a smile forming on his face as he said very much it was.

"What do you want?" he asked, all hostility if ever intended faded out in his voice.

I bowed my head, knowing all too well that a blush colored my cheeks. The icy wind seemed to lift my words and take them away. "Would it be too explicit if I say it's you?"

"You gotta be kidding." In that minute he was his teenage self, incredulous and skeptic to the core that someone could actually be interested in him beyond his mutation, and full of doubts and full of beliefs that everything had a price. Whatever I would say, life seemed to prove _him_ right in the end and it made me sad. I knew I had lost his confidence and would have a hell of a time to earn it again but it didn't deter me a bit.

"I ain't", my voice was barely above a whisper. He responded with a hardly disguised longing glance that shot through his face to just quickly give its place over to the mask that always suggested he couldn't care less about the world. I stepped to him, unable to look at that face of a stranger any longer, lifting my hands to stroke his face in a tantalizing attempt to wipe his mask of alienation away, to smooth his frown out, half expecting him to flinch and reel back. He didn't budge, though, just stood there clumsily like someone on the edge of an abyss, waiting for the inevitable tumble.

"Kitty… I can't…" he mumbled hoarsely and I pulled him down and kissed him because I as well couldn't deal with anything he didn't find the strength in him to cope with. His body recoiled from mine a tiny bit in pure surprise before pulling me to him again in a fiery, desperate embrace and after so long time all of a sudden all the spiraling, the body-melting, sparkling sensation returned in my limbs like an elemental tidal wave, washing everything away, taking with it the mockery of a life I had without him, and didn't understand how I managed to make myself believe that this kind of passion, this heart-wrenching affection didn't exist outside in the real world. He held me tight, fingers grasping my clothes with the vehemence of someone drowning or as if he believed I was going to phase through his grip anytime.

Suddenly I realized how foolish I had been, frantically trying to be the part of a relationship where I could feel whole again, not really discovering that my shameful yearning for mere kisses, hug or soft words in general wasn't the real case; subconsciously I was missing _his_ scent, _his_ whispers and _his_ warm breath on my skin, when he could give me the creeps with every glance, touch and sigh. I had been searching for Lance in Piotr, all the good things without the bad ones, but all along I hadn't realized that the good things weren't desired on their own, they didn't thrill me a bit and it was a shame in a way. I'd wanted the same passion, the same caress I'd had by Lance's side without the problems and troubles that occurred during our relationship but it wasn't possible. I didn't have the heart in what we had with Piotr.

I wrapped my arms around Lance's neck, breathing in his scent, losing myself in the sensation of the touch of his skin I hadn't forgotten, and my head was reeling, the world was reeling and I couldn't do anything but cling onto him.

"I'm living two corners from here", he whispered, his body tensing. I looked at him, the red blurs around his lips, still dazed by his familiar taste, and nodded dizzily.

He was pulling me after him with a face of a soldier marching into war. Determined, ready to fight. Ready to die. He paced so fast that I had to run to keep up with his long strides. The whole thing was so impossible as we were approaching something we'd never experienced together. He lived too close; I didn't even recognize that we were doing the same old game again, everything from the beginning, lies and secret meetings.

"Is this that?" I pointed at the door while he was searching through his pockets for the keys. At his affirmative nod, I phased us through the door, feeling perky and playful.

"It's kinda shabby", he said somewhat apologetically.

I spared only a quick glance around. It was actually shabby all right but I didn't really care.

Lance was leaning against the doorframe, shoulders fallen, gaze fixed on me, torn between desire and a faint will to stay away from me, and judging by his expression I guessed he was thinking I would change my mind anyways and laugh in his face that it was just a joke and we would continue hating each other. Shadowcat and Avalanche. Suddenly I hated these names. His lonesome glance evolved a cold grip around my stomach. I reached out for his hand and with a smooth, soft movement we intertwined, impatiently, with hunger. We hardly strip our shoes and coats. My head felt empty, only my heart pulsated violently, with huge leaps against my ribs.

His bed cried out with us. The dim light of the street lighting filtered in the room and wrapped his skin in a strange bluish glow. I closed my eyes against the sight because there was something giddy in the way he looked, something that made me fall, fall, out of my own skin, out of my mind and I was in dread of being wiped out by a wonderful and frightful death. But I opened my eyes after all, bewitched, because not watching him was even more painful.

It was incredible how my fingers found their place in the hollows and bulges of his body and they fit in every perfect curve and cavity his bones and muscles formed, filling them as he filled me. We seemed smoldering in the dark with every touch shared, every kiss stolen. His scent, taste and feel culminated inside me in an excruciating ecstasy - it was nothing like with Piotr, and I almost cried when the realization hit me, not sure if out of joy or sorrow.

I slept vaguely that night, often startled out of shallow slumber, reaching out for him in the dark, to touch him, to make sure he was Lance and he was there, and lying awake counting his breathing, feeling the calm pulsation in his wrist. My mind was in overdrive, shifting between consciousness and sleep, making me float in a numbing void.

I woke up in the wee hours next day, it had just started dawning. I reluctantly slipped out from under the blanket, and later fully dressed I was sitting on the edge of the bed, watching Lance closely. In the morning lights for a second glance he was slim and even underfed, I could count his ribs easily. His lips were chapped, hands tanned, shoulders and elbows jutting. And still, I found him more beautiful than the previous night when he'd looked so perfect. I wanted to take it with me, the memory of this one night. Suddenly I was more than grateful Piotr was far from Bayville. I didn't want anything less than him kissing my sins away.

I scouted around in my pockets for something that I could leave a message with. All I could find was ID card, lip-gloss, money and my cell phone on mute. All of them are unable to be a message. I searched through the flat. It was not only shabby but empty too. Apart from the bed, a table with two chairs and a wardrobe, it didn't line up any furniture. Lance's belongings lay unpacked in a duffle bag at the bottom of the wardrobe. In the kitchen I found two plates, cutlery and a can opener. Nothing else.

I left without a sign. In fact, maybe I didn't even want to leave anything behind. As I ran down the stairs, I thought contently that the hungry beast roaring inside me was fed already for good. This was the last big fat lie I shoved down my throat. Little did I know then that it was the monster of nightmare tales that grew a second and third head after tasting blood or having them cut off. My happy little heart was the last it would devour.

In the courtyard of the Institute I lay on the snowy ground, outstretched, facing the skies and was laughing and shedding tears at the same time because everything seemed so unbearably beautiful.


	15. On a wicked carousel

**A/N#1**: Lance's POV.

**A/N#2**: (One of my favourite) quote(s) is from the movie 'The English patient'.

_To Theevilhillbilly_: Actually, most of your questions won't be answered:D And now thinking of it, it makes me a bit worried if I should have touched upon this Piotr line more... But screwing things up again, well, you will get enough of that:D

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**Chapter 15: On a wicked carousel**

_Betrayals in war are childlike compared with our betrayals during peace._

I'd said to myself I'd spend the night with her even if that was my last time I could hold her, the last good thing that would happen to me, because it was worth anything I'd ever had in my life; no matter if I had to live like a wrecked man till the end of days. But next morning when I woke up to the sound of her picking her clothes up and moving around in the flat hastily, clearly eager to be out of there before I might wake up, the reality, the outcome of the deal with the devil was crushing me. I think I'd never really imagined how it'd be to have only one night and nothing else anymore, only the memories and her faint scent imprinted on the sheets and pillow. Lying there motionless I forbade myself even a tad bit of softness as I felt despair rising in me and trying to drive me to sit up and beg her to stay just a little longer and fake a smile, fake a kiss and make me believe we could still be something more than two trains on separate tracks, rushing away beside each other. I fought the urge, because a fake smile would have pierced me even more than her wordless departure did but inside I was dying a bit with every step and minute taking her farther from me. A fake smile. I had seen it too many times in my life. I couldn't bear it now because it would have conveyed regret, saying it was a mistake that she wanted to forget with all her might. Saying it was a dead-end.

Somehow all our relationship had been a bumpy wicked dead-end, we got derailed and broke into pieces. I don't know why she wanted to try that track again but she definitely found it a ridiculous idea in the morning light. I'd thought I could never want her more than I'd wanted her that night but when I saw her at the crack of dawn, standing by the window, barefooted, fixing her hair with a hairpin, silent farewell in all her movements, she was more beautiful, more precious to me than in any other time of our past tense relationship.

I could have bet that was the last time I saw her. But the same afternoon I found her standing on my threshold, flushed and smiling, and I knew I should have done something to stop the cycle that brought me closer and closer to an inevitable abandonment when I still had some strength in me, when I still had my dignity but I couldn't.

I watched numbly as she laid the table, filling it with box lunch, neat and nice, like an indoor picnic.

"I wanted to have a dinner with you", she explained with a smile as if she had just dropped in on a sudden idea. She even fetched napkins decorated with garlands of mistletoe and golden bells. She always had this magic that could make everyone around her forget all the tension, all the fear and enter the mood she was in. I didn't want to be blinded with this charm though, because I still remembered how it felt watching her walking away.

"Why don't we go somewhere?" I asked, examining her face. When she grew uneasy, almost frightened, I knew nothing had changed. It would have been a hard blow if I'd had any illusions about us anymore.

Her voice was shaking a bit, almost imperceptibly, when she remarked we could go if that was what I wanted.

I couldn't help but retreat back to my shell of sarcasm. "I don't want you to make such sacrifices and let your friends know about our little _liaison_."

She folded a napkin in half, opened her mouth to shoot back and closed it again. It wasn't anything she could argue with.

We were eating in silence. I don't think it was like she'd planned it to be, and somehow it filled me with bitter satisfaction that I still had some control in what was going on. Even if an as off-putting control as this.

Halfway through the dinner I gave her yet another kick for drawing me into this game again, making me someone I hated to be so easily when there was no sense whatsoever in repeating it all over again if we and everything around us were still the same. "I wonder what Storm would say that I of all people finish off her cooking."

"Bon appétit, that's what she'd say", she replied a bit angrily.

We didn't speak any more. There was no sense in doing so, and it became some kind of an unwritten rule we were more than keen to comply with whenever we met again. No words said, no offense taken. We covered the past failures with silence and ignoring kisses but it didn't make them go away – they lie there around us, spread everywhere and every now and then we stumbled upon them before hastily taking a step aside to ignore them. So we hardly talked, sometimes we were just sitting next to each other silently. Old hurts and old betrayals built walls between us - they'd left a foul and permanent trace in us and it was hard to have faith in anything again. Sometimes we made love. Our bodies seemed to express what our brains refused from the lips. I don't know if I were happy those days. I couldn't leave behind the past events, my own weakness, self-pity and pride. And I couldn't leave my love behind either.

.

"You will leave me. It will end one day. Sooner or later. Hell, I'm not even sure if anything has started at all…" I broke the rule one day. It just spilled. My survivor part again reminded me how deep I'd had to climb back from. Recalling those memories I wanted to forget and bury somewhere I wouldn't find them made me question whether it really was worth that misery. "Is it necessary to make me go through it again?"

"No, I won't leave you. This time I won't." She placed a hand on my chest, locking our gaze. I almost believed her and those blue, blue eyes.

I shrugged with as much nonchalance as I could muster. "The fate of bad boys, that is."

"You ain't no bad boy. There's a lot more to you."

She remarked it with so much conviction that I wanted to laugh in her face bitterly that she became such a softy about me lately. Instead I said ironically I surely was only the victim of circumstances. She rolled her eyes, something I'd seen her doing a million times.

"You never seemed to believe in anything but this stupid phrase."

"It ain't no phrase, dammit. It's fact. That's my life."

"Oh God, do you really wanna go back to this topic, Lance? Because I sure as hell don't."

"No wonder. You've always been an ace when it came to understand others outside your social class."

She reeled back, features hardened by anger and hurt. "It's unfair and you know that. Especially since you have never exactly killed yourself to let me know more about you let alone make me understand those things."

"It won't work", I stated matter-of-factly. "That's that."

"Sure. With such an approach."

"It's always my fault, isn't it?"

"I didn't say it, Lance."

"You didn't have to."

In the old times we'd always been able to ruin any good atmosphere by raking up the past and it wasn't different this time. She strolled over to me. I didn't even realize I'd stood up somewhere between two accusations. She hugged me, face buried in my chest, voice muffled against my bare skin as she sighed she didn't want to fight anymore. I didn't want to either. I'd never wanted but it was just as much the part of our relationship as the two of us.

"Why did you come back?" she asked silently, a hint of reproach in her words but she clung onto me tighter than ever before.

"To make your life miserable", I said without the slightest of humor. Even I couldn't tell if there was any truth in it. Kitty looked up at my face, clearly not knowing what to think. "It seems I succeeded, didn't I?"

"No, that's not true. I don't feel miserable."

"Are you sure? You have a boyfriend and still, you're here with me. Or maybe he's just a crappy lover."

She looked as if she got slapped across the face. I wanted to hurt her so she'd suffer, so she would feel what I had to go through. How low I was, how base! Kitty was close to crying. Normally I'd have beaten the living hell out of anyone who caused her such pain, and if I could I would have done it to myself, and still there was some kind of cruel pleasure in it, cold, unappeasable and torturing.

I was sure she wouldn't come again. As it turned out later I was wrong once again.

"You think that's all I want from you? Sex?"

"I don't know. Maybe you want something that's long gone. Because _you_ _wanted_ it to be gone."

Kitty bowed her head, face hidden behind her silk locks.

_Long gone…_ I don't know if she was taken aback by this or merely by the accusatory words – I just wished it was the former but I felt the foul taste of the words in my mouth anyways. The taste of untruth. They echoed emptily in my soul.

"But I don't know. We never speak. You never told me why you're here", I whispered. There was a small twitch above her lips, eyes darkening; she shot off away from me.

"Okay, I understand. You don't want me to be here", she huffed, collecting and putting her clothes on.

I felt tired. "I didn't say this."

"You didn't have to."

She didn't even seem to realize what a déjà vu it was. We were pathetic. Operating with the same childish means and words. I hated us these times.

Sighing, I tried to sound calm and collected. "Just to make it clear, Kitty. You're leaving now because you don't know the answer or don't want to share it with me, not because I don't want you here. And we both know it."

Kitty halted in the middle of the room, frozen in a statuelike stance and was staring at me with an unfamiliar glint in her eyes. Face softening, colored by a slight, beautiful blush she was so painfully tempting that my skin ached by the few steps distance that separated us.

I knew my voice was telltale when I hoarsely spoke. "When you're ready, maybe you'll tell me."

"You really have changed", she stated almost softly, and I couldn't decide if it was a compliment or an accusation as she strolled out of the flat without a word.

Just to return the next day again.


	16. Love

**A/N:** Kitty's POV.

* * *

**Chapter 16: Love…**

Call a spade a spade.

Strange as it is, beyond a line I was always lacking in this kind of bravery. I could face a dangerous enemy anytime without even batting an eyelid but looking in the mirror I was always coward. Fighting some megalomaniac villain was easy in a certain way. Clear. Simple. Black, white, good, bad.

Admitting things that I doubted to be proper or were of great significance was another case.

Every time I left Lance's flat, full and satisfied, it was easy to convince myself I wouldn't come again but the next day always found me at his door. I never was someone yearning for carnal pleasure but this time I thought it to be some sort of physical need, finding solace and warmth in his arms from what I had with Piotr and what I had all along considered only a bit rough around the edges but slowly I had to realize it simply wasn't working at all. Not then, not before. Funny how I always tried to put that relationship in a favorable light, turning a blind eye to all the defects, and I did just the very opposite when I had been with Lance, continuously putting it down as something worthless while it lasted. But putting it down now as some sexual attraction was no explanation of those times when I was just sitting next to him, talking about nonsense and irrelevant things, listening to his breathing and feeling it was all fine with me. Feeling that the world could go on however it wanted to, without us, leaving us there between cracked walls and crumbling wallpapers, wrapped up in volatile silence.

His every touch was enflaming, full of desire. He touched me every time like I was a miracle, fragile and transient. He followed the lines and curves of my skin as if he wanted to draw me in his memories, to remember the particular moment till the end of times, to keep it there for good like a painting keeps its subject.

I felt so alive as if I was born again. Everything was so different with him. So painful, so passionate. So real.

It was something close to contentment and calmness, as cracked as it appeared sometimes but a faint imitation of happiness nonetheless. I carried out some kind of experiment, one time feeling him, the other time refraining myself from touching him at all, just to draw a conclusion about this mesmerizing pull he had on me. The pull was working, though, with or without any physical contact, and I was left to cope with it the way I should have long, long before.

By being bold enough to be honest to myself.

By calling a spade a spade.

There were days when he loved me and there were those when I felt he couldn't.

Sometimes he started speaking like in the old times but always stopped doing so quite abruptly like a child who takes its first steps on its own and when realizes there is no support within reach just falls immediately.

"What have you been doing in the past years?" I asked once. It was one of those issues he kept skirting.

This time he shrugged. "Nothing special. I killed someone."

I laughed shortly, recalling his odd sense of humor, but when his stern face didn't change I was taken aback.

He looked into my eyes, waiting to see which way the cat jumps. I didn't stir though. He leaned his head against the headrest of the bed. "Don't worry, it isn't punished by law."

I felt my stomach turn upside down. I knew my voice was cold and arguing. He'd always hated when I used that tone. "Every murder is punished, Lance."

He insisted, "This one is an exception." Reaching in the drawer of the nightstand, he took out a cigarette-box. His voice was cracked and despising, face hard almost like a stone. "It's me who I'm talking about. I killed myself every single day. But I have thousand lives."

He shook out a cigarette from the box and lit it. I didn't know what to say at his statement so I reacted by remarking I hadn't known he was smoking.

A strange rebellious glint flared up in his eyes. "I introduce you one of the means of suicide. Cruel and slow and not even sure…" He took a drag in the fag, and blew the smoke sidewards. "Open the window, I know about the whole passive smoking stuff. I'm not _that_ neglectful."

I didn't budge. "Why you're doing this?" I asked silently.

He pouted his lips, still a sardonic line on his face. "I deserve it?"

I rubbed my temples, asking him tiredly why he thought so and with another shrug he snarled at me bitterly. "For not being tough enough."

My heart fell. Tough enough. All those years before and after we'd first met racked him hard and it just became more serious with time. I couldn't deny I'd taken not a small part in it. He'd said once life would have been so much easier if he was a true villain, a monster, someone with no reserve, no morals or scruple. He didn't mention then but I understood what he meant: without emotions. He never seemed to understand this was what made him so special in my eyes.

I was watching him silently. Our gaze met for long, and I took the cig out of his hand and stubbed it out on the nightstand. Crouching next to him, I pulled him in a hug. His shoulders were stiff like of a statue but his heart was pounding madly under my arm. Strong, lonesome throbs, pumping disappointment and bitterness. I kissed him, trying to pass him my warmth and everything I felt for him in that very minute, trying to make him understand things even I had trouble to understand.

"I wish I could drain this poison out of your system."

He pulled away, cocking an eyebrow. "The one you put in there?"

My hand dropped. Hearing it loudly hurt more than I'd imagined. He said it so calmly, so unlike him. I'd never hated those mistakes and lies more than in that very minute.

He turned away from me, facing the window. It was already dark outside, snow started falling lightly. We didn't switch on the light; shadows from the dark corners were creeping forward slowly. Lance was thoughtful and silent. Somehow it felt like having him back and losing him again.

"I love you", I said, unable to hold it back any longer. It was so easy to say, it sounded so right, so true. Hearing it loudly, the answer at all questions he ever asked me those days, made everything clear around me.

Lance looked up, surprised, forlorn. Almost desperate. He lit another cigarette and hid behind a puff of smoke. It stung my eyes. This or something else, I didn't bother to figure out.

It was getting cold inside the room. The lack of a proper insulation let the chill creep in. Lance walked up to the window, and leaned against the windowsill as if standing without support made him weak. Beside him the poor imitation of a curtain was swaying lazily.

"You're just saying… it's some postcoital sentimentalism…" he said obviously trying hard to sound sarcastic but failing completely. I knew him too well. In the dim light filtering in from outside his eyes were invisible under his brows, shadows deepening his features. "Have you ever at all felt like this about me?"

"How can you even think of it? Yes… I… all along… ever since…" I whispered, suddenly realizing what Rogue had not once told me.

Lance looked angry and bitter.

"All along…" he repeated, rubbing his eyes with forceful movements, almost violently. "All along. You mean you loved me when I left Bayville? You mean the past two years were-" He faltered.

There was no need for him to finish it. _For nothing_… He wanted to say he had to go through hell for nothing. I felt pathetically stupid.

Lance clenched the windowsill hard, his knuckles turning white.

Nothing was said for so long that the silence became unbearable.

"You don't love me anymore, do you?" I asked with forced easiness. "It's okay, I understand…"

When he spoke, his voice was hoarse. "I don't know, Kitty. I don't know anymore whether I love or hate you."

I had to swallow my fears, my disappointment, and I think I wanted to swallow my love for him, too. "So you couldn't move on? Never tried to find someone else?"

He shook his head weakly, disapprovingly. "I tried to replace you so eagerly that I didn't quite waste time to choose properly. Later I became picky, though, unwittingly striving to find someone like you but always failed to, so gradually I stopped trying at all." For a minute he stared into space, his index finger followed an invisible pattern on the glass. "Every single one of them reminded me, proved me how good you were, how perfect, and it was worse."

"Now I know it better, Lance. I so strived to please my friends that I forgot what I really wanted, what my real feelings were."

He looked at me, this time with clear sadness. "What you want, Kitty, might not exist anymore. I'm not the same."

Quietly I stated I'd changed too. Only our faults were unchanged. The same old faults. All the hiding and lies we hated but couldn't go on without.

"Don't we have a chance? Can't we start everything from the beginning?"

He sighed, troubled, with a hint of impatience. But maybe it was the lack of hope. "What's the point of it? I'd kept trying and trying to be better for you, to be equal to you but the only thing I could gain was hurting you. The more I tried the worse I became. I wanted to be good for you but grew arrogant. I was too stubborn to realize I failed, and too selfish to let you go."

"Maybe this time _I should _try to be better for you," I remarked silently.

He stared at me, faint wrinkles appearing on his forehead. "You're serious, aren't you? You really want this."

I nodded solemnly. "I'm willing to, Lance. I'd do whatever you want."

"Would you leave him?"

"Yes, I would," I stated firmly. "It's unfair to lie to him anyways."

"Would you leave him even if there wasn't anything between us?"

It took me off-guard. Not the question but the possibility of Lance and me going separate ways. I closed my eyes bitterly, full of fear. "I think so."

Lance turned away, biting his bottom lip, every muscle in his arms tensing. "It won't go away, will it? I don't know why, though. All it seems to give is pain."

"The laws of love are cruel, Lance. And unreasonable."

He touched the glass with his forehead, silently agreeing with my words.

I crawled across the bed, and stepped to him. "Why not give it a try, Lance?"

I touched him in the arm. He looked down at his skin, the small goosebumps along his arm, and cracked a bitter laughter. "You see, my body betrays me."

"We might make it this time… I'm sure we can," I whispered.

He slowly nodded; anyone seeing his face would have thought he was mourning.

I don't know if he believed what I said, but I know I did.

* * *

**Note:** I have a kind of illustration to this chapter (oh, self-promotion, you suck!). I cant remember which was born the first, the chapter or the drawing, anyways the idea is the same behind both: (copy this after the http thing, without the spaces before the 2 dots) miraxterrik. deviantart .com/gallery/#/d1wiex2

Dont be too harsh, I'm not an overly talented artist:D (I wonder if I'll be banned for putting a link in here?)


	17. is a losing game

**A/N#1:** Lance's POV.

**A/N#2:** Lyrics from _Nothing in my way _by Keane.

* * *

**Chapter 17: …is a losing game**

_Why d'you laugh?  
When I know that you're hurt inside.  
__And why'd you lie  
When you wanna die, when you're hurt inside_

What do you feel? What are you thinking of?

I tried to answer these questions not once, not twice. Simple questions. And with such a complex answer.

When she stated she loved me, my first reaction was an automatic rejection of her words. I think I really tried not to believe her. The look on her face, though, was the close reflection of mine from a few years earlier: some kind of painful realization that was huger than its owner. It struck me hard.

She'd said once she felt all those moments we were spending together were escaping unexploited through the valve of time. Sometimes she tended to say such things. I don't know if she read these somewhere or were the product of her ruminations, it doesn't really matter. I had simply asked her what she wanted then. She'd replied she wanted to turn off this valve. I understood what she meant. We were drowning. And the moments that should have built something slipped through our fingers, almost destructively.

She did everything to make up for all those things that had never worked between us. These days we were brought to light in a way: she insisted leaving the safety and secret realm of my flat and going out together but all along she behaved like she felt furtive eyes on us – I thought it wasn't worth it. We gained nothing but fake reassurance.

She planned to spend Christmas Eve with our respective friends since that was why I'd come back to Bayville but on Christmas Day she would come over to my flat. Funny as it seems despite all those years we had been a couple this one would have been our first X-mas together. I agreed silently, not pushing her in any direction at all. I knew what in fact it meant: to carry her plan through, she had to reveal this relationship for her friends. I think I was scared. She looked so sincere and still I couldn't decide whether I simply didn't have faith in her words anymore, fearing that after preparing myself for that day she would ditch me again, or I was scared that she might indeed come. It wasn't easy to imagine a world where there was no pretending, no lying anymore. Where she would openly love me. It seemed we couldn't operate or exist without all the deception we'd covered our relationship with.

These days I wasn't anyone I could be proud of. I was like a general who recognized the situation where there was no going on without risk, someone who valued defense more than anything. Someone who had seen cities burn too many times. I wasn't being jaded though. I was more of a coward.

I think I tried to talk her out of feeling the way she did or willing something I also would have wanted if it wasn't for those burn marks.

"We gambled our time away long time ago. I dealt with losing you. It took me two years but in the end I think I dealt with it." I guess the proper wording would have been that I _wanted_ to think so. But after all Kitty would always tell me words had power to _create_; this time I tried to believe it could work.

"So you don't want me anymore", she whispered with a kind of fear that wasn't unfamiliar to me.

"That's not that. I'd want you in any time of my life. But I can't do this. I can't. I can't give you what you want. I wouldn't let you in. I'm not whole anymore." I paused for a moment, contemplating if I should say the words that had just popped up in my mind. They were nasty and hateful, so poisonous that I couldn't bear them any longer. "I guess a part of me, Kitty, would always hate you."

She didn't say anything. Her face didn't lose the edge of mild sadness but it seemed light and volatile and was wiped away by a carefree smile. I thought my words didn't affect her too much. I thought it justified me being cautious about her promises. I realized how wrong I was only a day or two later when answering a knock on my door I found someone else than Kitty.

"Rogue," I nodded, leaning against the doorframe, blocking the way just anyhow. Finding an X-man on the threshold had always turned out nothing but bad news. I raised an eyebrow quite cynically. "What do I owe the pleasure? You came to absorb my thoughts?"

She strolled in beside me without any invitation. "Very droll. Ya exactly know what I would like to talk about."

I stared at her. All the X-geeks were so predictable. "I can guess. I'm not good enough for her. I know the story, save your breath."

She rolled her eyes, so usual movement of hers. "Well, that might be true but that's not what I wanted to say."

She took a look around with a mixture of mild disgust and amusement. The flat didn't look better than the Brotherhood house in its worst days. She faced me, slight frown crossing her forehead. She had the power to make everyone take her seriously with a single glance. And it had nothing to do with her dreadful mutation.

"Brace yourself up, Lance, and stop playing your stupid games against Kitty."

"What stupid games?"

"Hurting her the way ya do. And watching idly as things slip away. Ya know, it was always Kitty who had more things to lose. She has enough things to defeat, mostly herself, there is no need for her to fight _your_ self-doubt. It may be true that it's not the best with ya but now she already knows how it is _without ya_."

"Maybe it's too late", I barked gruffly. Talking about my private mess wasn't my favourite pastime. I turned my back on her rudely but in fact, I wanted to do it to my own spouting feelings.

She laughed briefly, sarcastically. "Ya can fool yourself however ya want but I ain't no blind, Lance. Now from the two of ya it is ya who is more determined. Ya should help her, not be against her. First of all she has to convince herself she should dare live her life the way she wants to."

"Great, good for her."

Rogue stared at me blankly. "Don't be a dickhead. Ya really don't understand?"

I shrugged, saying it seemed so. Rogue cast me a cold glance and stepped to the door. "With time ya will realize it. Just pray it wouldn't be too late."

With that she was out of there. I stared at the closed door, and the ominous sensation of failure poured on me.


	18. The hardest part

**A/N#1:** Kitty's POV.

**A/N#2:** Lyrics1: _The hardest part _by Coldplay. Lyrics2: _This is not real love _by George Michael ft. Mutya.

* * *

**Chapter 18: The hardest part**

_And the hardest part  
Was letting go, not taking part  
Was the hardest part_

The café was crowded and noisy, full of people relaxing after the last rush of Christmas preparations. It was only us in the whole place who remained in silence like there was nothing more to say.

Sometimes we were young and happy, and then there were times we grew old and tired when everything seemed too fast, too vivid and loud, and it would happen so abruptly that it hurt like some kind of physical transformation. As Christmas drew near, Lance fell in the latter state more often. He tried to shut himself away from me and bind me to him at the same time, and when he held me, he held me tight, almost with anger. He always could feel and think only in extremes.

The line when there was no going on like that anymore was near. This line was more inside us than forced by the circumstances, and it was worse.

It was only a few hours till Christmas Eve. I was excited, a warm rush of blood flooded over me; it was almost like right before high-board diving. A deep breath before falling.

Lance was indifferent towards the whole X-mas frenzy with the apathy of those having been alone for a long while. I wanted to cheer him up, I wanted to make up for all those Christmases, holidays and birthdays he had no one to spend with, so I reminded him that I was going over to him in the morning. He simply nodded and said okay, looking almost skeptical.

His fingers were following the lines of the wooden table, drawing circles in the crumbs. Mine were searching for his. He was so faraway, lost in thoughts, gaze fixed on nothing particular. I wanted to meet his eyes, to make sure he was really there and alive, so I said something insignificant about the pie, something like it was delicious like once my grandma's, one of the strongest memories of my childhood. He replied that his strongest was always being hungry. I was silenced by his attitude. I don't know if it was true or false, but I could feel in that very moment he had just built yet another wall between us. I wasn't hungry anymore. I placed down the fork and touched my stomach briefly. It felt like stone.

"Everything's been already said once", he remarked almost to himself. "Between us."

I couldn't figure out why he said it, and he didn't give any more explanation. Something nameless began to sink in, fall down inside and whatever it was, made me scared. I couldn't use my mind. I was sitting there, letting myself flow away with the tunes from the stereos, _I hate what I've become but I'm still gonna leave you_. Suddenly Lance looked up, directly into my eyes but remained quiet. And still, horribly, awkwardly I knew what he was thinking, what he was conveying with his eyes. I knew that inwardly he was singing with the song.

He stared out the window, a faint, deformed smile painted his face softer yet darker. I followed his gaze. Outside a heavy snowfall curtained off the street. I noted unwittingly, it looked like rain at first sight. Lance glanced at me, the strange smile slowly fading away.

"Really", he whispered almost gravely, eyes dark and aged. It stirred up something in me. A second passed, then another and another. Someone was leaving the café and wished the waitress a merry Christmas. Lance got up without any sign that he intended to leave in my company but I was made of stone and wasn't able to budge as I was watching him walking out. That moment I loved him more than any time in my life.

And I knew that was the moment when I probably lost him before I even got him back.

.

"It's good to have you back, Kitty. You've been such a Miss Perfection lately", Rogue teased me almost reproachfully. I stole a glance at Jean, but she didn't seem to catch the hint.

We were bustling in the kitchen, fine-tuning for the evening and in the process I'd spaced out and failed to answer Rogue's question. The last hours, maybe days seemed like running in a hamster wheel, around-around in a small cage and getting nowhere. I wanted to break out of this horrible circle, find a way out.

An explosion sounded throughout the whole building and saved me from commenting Rogue's words.

"Bayville High must be a boring place without us", I smiled, watching a laser beam plowing up the courtyard. Most likely Scott and Gambit were having their usual clash of views again.

Jean laughed lightheartedly. "Yeah, no dragon-like monsters popping out of nowhere, no earthquakes…" She stopped abruptly, her eyes darting at me.

I picked up a cookie basket and said it was okay, I could handle mentioning him. Jean seemed content. "Great. At least it means you can deal with past decisions truly."

"Yeah, like being in love with someone is a matter of decision", Rogue huffed.

"Of course, not but-" Jean trailed off. "If it was, she wouldn't have fallen for Lance in the first place."

I chuckled faintly as I guessed she deemed it a joke. But I felt all layers of pretending were torn apart with that laughter. I was too small to contain such a tempest of emotions.

"I would have", I said to them quietly. "I still do. I still love him. We are seeing each other every day."

Rogue looked indifferent as always and even Jean seemed much rather concerned than surprised. I don't think I had been able to fool them in the previous weeks.

"But Piotr…"

I cut Jean off with an impatient wave. "I will tell him when he's back. But please don't even start it. I don't wanna hear any of the 'he is not good enough' thing."

"I didn't even plan to", Jean said taken aback. "And would never even do it."

"Come on. You always have. After Apocalypse when we started it again you all without exception just freaked out."

Jean looked almost hurt. "We did not, Kitty. After what they did in Mexico, no one really was against Lance. Okay, maybe Scott a bit, but he has some issues when it comes to Lance. It was self-evident for us. I don't say we understood it, but never were against you. Never tried to make you apart. We knew he wouldn't ever hurt you… at least not on purpose and that was enough."

Rogue put in that Jean had a point there. I gaped at them. "But those looks you gave me…"

"There were no looks, Kitty. We accepted your decision and thought if you were able to manage being in different teams then it is fine with us. But then you went on with your relationship and for some reason kept it a secret no one really understood why. You denied it but it was obvious you were together."

"What? You knew?" I turned white.

"Don't look at me like this. It wasn't because there are telepaths among us. Everyone knew it but we let you go on like that because you must have had a reason. Then Lance disappeared from Bayville and nobody knew what happened and you never talked about it. You know, all along we were thinking you would tell us about the two of you when you are ready."

I gaped at her, confused. "Me? Ready?"

Jean nodded. "Yes, Kitty. Because it was maybe you, not us, who had reservations about this relationship."

I tried to deny it but I found no arguments in me. The cookie basket was left there half-empty. Something was terribly true in Jean's words and it left some kind of guilty conscience in me.

Rogue crossed her arms, disapproval in the corner of her mouth. "Ya know what I think, Kitty? Ya weren't bold enough. Ya've always wanted to be normal, or at least eager to pretend being so. And in this picture a normal boyfriend would have fitted in, not one like Lance who got second glances from every decent parent or any of your own friends."

My heart sank. Rogue was right. I could finish the train of words now even on my own. I'd tried to change Lance so desperately to fit him in my perfect little world and chop off all the parts outside the frame that I hadn't realized that when it failed, it wasn't his fault but all mine. I'd always been silenced by my own doubts and fears and all the things people would say or think and I'd even read my own doubts into other people's silence for the sake of some twisted self-justification. I'd dumped him out of mere convenience and forced hypocrisy. I betrayed him, I betrayed us. We were so shamefully unworthy for our feelings, we should have been fighting for it to the last ditch. No lies were left in me, no doubts, only the memory of all those things I'd never appreciated enough because I'd never managed to understand that something flawless didn't necessarily cause more happiness than something with defects.

Suddenly I felt sick and weak. I stood up and walked out of the kitchen because those wasted years and chances almost crushed me to death.

Next morning, though my head was full of those things I wanted to tell Lance, full of those decisions I'd never been determined enough to make up to that day, in a way I was prepared for what happened. In hindsight, it was all clear and obvious, and I have to admit, well-deserved too. When I knocked on his door, then phased through it and found he wasn't in there, it was a reasonable conclusion he was still at the Brotherhood house. Then I saw that behind the half open door, the wardrobe was empty, and I knew I was late. I had been late maybe even two years earlier.

I rushed over to the Brotherhood house; an intangible clock seemed to be ticking inside my stomach. Wanda opened the door, and before I could say anything, a faint smile appeared on her face. "So he's gone again."

I stared at her, tongue-tied, dozens of questions flashing across my face, and she remarked unasked he'd been there the previous evening and left early morning, stating he would go over to his flat in the downtown. "Those idiots surely believed him but I could tell he was lying. He's always been almost foolishly frank."

I nodded, my vision blurring, fixing my eyes on the somewhat fresh trace of car tires across the snowy lawn. Burden of unshed tears and unlived lives was welling up in my eyes. For a long, dizzy moment I didn't know where to go.

Wanda was still at the door. When she spoke, though she sounded nearly sympathizing, there was a hint of grudge in her voice. "Now you'll be able to decide what you want, Kitty. And how much you want it."

I closed my eyes, and suddenly I felt painfully alone and small.

Loving somebody. And letting go.

I felt a heavy burden in my heart, so crushingly massive that it weighed down my shoulders.

He didn't trust me. He didn't dare trust me. I closed my eyes against the reality – closed against what I knew I couldn't do easily. Or couldn't do at all.

_Letting go._

Cliché or not, that very minute I realized both of us had to fall before we could rise again. If we ever could. And now it was my turn of falling.

Falling and breaking into pieces.


	19. Shivers

_I again forgot to update, sorry. It won't happen again though, since this is the last chapter. This is maybe the only one I'm not so sure about or satisfied with. You may find it a tad bit forced or unexpected but I couldn't make myself to draw an other ending. _

_Thank you for you reviews, they always make me happy._

**A/N:** Lance's POV.

* * *

**Chapter 19: Shivers**

I hated Sundays. I found no purpose to even get out of bed, to shave, to get changed, to do anything at all. Sundays were some kind of a comatose state, a numb intermission between everyday's heartbeats. I never had anything to do so much that at one point I'd decided to learn and get GED. I guess it was some sort of redirection activity replacing the need to face the fact that I was pathetically alone and didn't like it anymore, or an alibi when I could pretend to be busy and approvingly responsible but in fact all I always did was spacing out on the couch, mess of textbooks all around the room, MTV flickering on mute just to imitate some life in the flat - lying motionless like in a coffin and I think in a way I really was a living dead, eyes open, breathing, but other than that nothing reminded of a real living human.

I think a part of me never left Bayville and the shabby small flat where for short moments I could believe that we could be something with Kitty.

I'd barely had any visitor, so when there was a knock on my door, I first mentally checked the bills on the kitchen counter – electricity paid, rent not due yet. It was almost noon; I had just finished my breakfast. It was April, windy, cold and rainy. Even the daylight seemed a constant twilight, grey and sad, so when I opened the door, I only saw the shadows gathering in a silhouette that made my heart race. I opened the door wider to let the light filter in the corridor, every single brain cell working on processing the sight.

It was her.

She was there. Really her, really there. She seemed worn-out, tired, eyes red as if she had been crying all along the past months since I left. I didn't want to, I didn't _dare_ think that it was maybe true. That it was because of me.

She didn't even say hello, all she muttered was my name with a tone that spun my world around. There was a long silence; the doorknob turned ice in my palm and I was aware only delayed of the biting wind in the stairway. All I could ask was unfinished questions, interrogative words, hanging in the air just the way I ended – or rather, failed to end – whatever we had back in December.

"Wanda told me where to find you", she explained, eyes fixed on my face with some kind of desperate readiness, and somehow I realized what sort of a fight she'd been through. She looked different, strong and fragile at the same time but definitely calm and wiser - and it wasn't the wisdom of books and boring lectures. "I'm weak. I'm selfish. I couldn't just..." She closed her eyes, swallowing, suddenly appearing smaller than ever. Her voice was a sigh as she remarked: "I'm not as strong as you. I couldn't get over you."

I laughed sarcastically, turned around and left the door ajar for her. "Yeah, like I managed to."

She halted in the middle of the room, fingers knitted together.

"You were right. Everything's been said between us," she began quietly. "But sometimes there was no intention behind it. Sometimes we haven't meant what we said. We should've tried it with real will behind it."

I sat down on the couch just to do something, because trying to form the words she didn't say out loud was frightening and tempting in a bittersweet way.

Suddenly, I saw things clearly. Feeling sorry for myself made me blind for years. I hadn't perceived that both of us were guilty. My sin was my overwhelming doubt that sometimes became almost organic, it'd grown so alive, so hungry that it finally defeated me. I doubted myself, doubted her and mostly I doubted us. And her sin, it was clear now, was her betrayal. During the years I spent far from Bayville I tried to curse her, tried to hate her for this betrayal, I tried to push her out of my mind for what she'd done to me. But I was mistaken. Her sin wasn't betraying me. It was betraying herself.

Sometimes she was just as emotionally inept as me. When we love, we love chaotically – when we love sometimes we might not be aware of it. I think it was her fate.

She strolled slowly around the flat, appearing light and almost transparent. How could we fail so many times? How could every good thing around us turn into something loathsome? Maybe she was right; we hadn't tried wholeheartedly when it was really needed to be persistent.

"Streets taught me to think only of myself", I muttered more to myself than to her.

She nodded, her glance caressing. "But your heart said it otherwise."

There was a long silence. She sat down opposite me, our knees softly touching. "My parents taught me things I should follow but my heart can't."

I knew we had the same thing in our minds - all the wasted time when I was thinking only of myself and she was thinking of only others. We never had anything in between.

I told her we couldn't bring back that past. She shook her head, her skin a little bit pale in the dim light.

"I know. And I don't even want to. Not at all. It never worked anyways. But now mature and all, we might see and handle things differently."

"Yeah, right", I remarked, trying to push as much sarcasm in these two words as possible. It faintly occurred to me I had to try it hard.

"Lance…" she whispered. "After so long…"

I cut in, sighing defeated. "I know. It won't go away easily"

She chuckled briefly, her voice faltering. I was so close, so terribly close to give in, and I think there was only a small part of me that was too afraid to do so.

"I told you already. You might not get what you expect. I'm only put together, Kitty. I'm full of cracks."

"As you've always been", she said softly with memory-tasting words. "I think, in a way, I'm not whole either. From another point of view I've just found myself."

I buried my face in my palms, any objections fading away. "I was off because I couldn't afford losing you twice."

"You weren't going to lose me. I was there, just as I'd promised."

Her presence, the fact that she was there, was dizzying. I couldn't say anything more. Minutes passed by; a heavy wind shook the windows.

"Do you really think it wouldn't be better than… this?" She finished the sentence almost incredulously, and unwittingly I glanced around in the flat at the emptiness of every single corner and my life, and I knew she was right, and it injected a warm rush of blood – _life_ – into my veins.

"But how should we… when… where…"

She shrugged, a strange smug expression appearing on her face. "Once you told me: once you own it, nothing can own you. Remember? I think, finally we own our lives. It's only about us. No friends, no enemies, no powers, no one to save. We can solve anything if we want."

I tried to release the tension building up in me, and noted, "Doesn't it sound a bit sappy?" Kitty chuckled, telling it was good to be sappy sometimes. I couldn't disagree with that however I wanted to. "It starts to feel like you've just asked for my hand."

Kitty laughed. "Sort of. And what's your answer to my proposal?"

In a way I didn't even understand how I could ponder the question when ever since I left Bayville for the second time, everything turned grey and tasteless. I wanted it so much, I wanted it to work, wanted us to have another, umpteenth chance. "As far as I remember, you never knew a negative answer. So I have to say yes, or else you'd show up at my door every now and then", I smirked faintly.

"Show up? No. I'd sleep in the corridor… not that I couldn't phase in," she chuckled, eyes glistening.

For a long moment we were contemplating each other, knees still knitted. It was a beautiful silence; my heart was pounding with strong, lively beats.

"If it was a movie, you'd kiss me now," she commented with a fake-informative tone, her brows in a bookish curve.

Laughter was tickling me from inside. "And then a heart-shaped 'The end' sign would flow in?"

She smiled, her fingers playing around mine as she asked quietly, "And will they live happily ever after?"

I smiled at her, watching the light painting glittering stripes in her hair, and realizing I had no more lies and self-deception in me. "I don't know but maybe this time happier than ever before, and that is something."

* * *

_I'd love to see your overall opinion, even if you find the ending too cheesy or something, I'm really interested what you think. And thanks to all of you who faved this story._

_Stay tuned for more Lancitty in the future, because this is a pairing I cannot seem to get bored with^^_


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